Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 15, 1993 TAG: 9309180311
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ben Beagle
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
And I tell you in all candor that if the windows in the office had been made so that you could open them, I might stand in one of them and scream:
``Help me, Mr. and Mrs. America. I'm a prisoner in a world I never made, and this new computer keyboard I'm working on hates my guts, and I long for the snows of yesteryear.''
This isn't going to happen. Even if I could get the windows open, I'm too much of a wimp to do anything like that.
So what I have done is retreat into sentimental memories of how it used to be, when there were giants on the Earth and in newspaper city rooms who would have refused to write a news story on a television screen.
I'm not saying here that I was around when reporters wrote notes on their cuffs, but I have been here a while, and I miss, among other things, the sound of an honest telephone ringing.
City room phones these days have an effeminate sound. They don't ring. They burble. They croon.
Give me the old days when a phone ringing woke you up and there was a real live switchboard operator right there in the same room and on Christmas Eve, she'd play ``Jingle Bells'' on the office phones.
You didn't punch a lot of buttons with those phones. You dialed 'em with a firm hand while holding a cigarette, which you could stomp out on the floor because it was tile-covered and there was no fancy carpet.
Police reporters smoked unfiltered Camels in those days. Smoked 'em at their desks and let the ashes fall into their typewriters. Some of 'em may have died young, but they led interesting lives.
If you had told one of those guys he had to write on this funny little screen and sit in an ergonomic chair because it was good for him, he'd probably have called up one of his contacts and taken a job selling insurance.
The windows all opened then and in the summer coal dust came in, and this probably would have clogged up computers, but it didn't do much to an Underwood typewriter that was very heavy and used to taking a lot of punishment.
You could write two-finger masterpieces on one of those babies without worrying about having to remember to tell some dumb computer to be sure and not let them get away. They liked two-finger typists. Computer keyboards do not.
In the back shop those huge, seething, rattling linotype machines took raw lead and made English prose out of it. The people who worked back there actually got ink on them. And they smoked, too.
Actually, I was afraid to go back there because, in a short career as a deskman, I found I had no idea of how to know how much copy was needed to fill up the paper.
I would send over everything to be set into type on those huge machines and the ink-stained people who worked back there growled about that. They hated ``overset.''
But I know things change and I'll get the hang of this latest technological challenge to yours truly here.
But, boy, I wish I could smoke an unfiltered Camel again and hear the switchboard operator play ``Jingle Bells'' on the phone on Christmas Eve.
by CNB