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To: Paved Paradise
Oh brother... all you proved is you have more “free” time right now than I do.
Yes, that's likely. I'm retired.

But the real reason I went off on a rant there is that in my work I was in a situation where secretarial support was in short supply while, in the pre-WP era, the only way to compose text was with a pencil (tho I am, and was, a touch typist, I never found it practical to use that skill on the job until I had easy time-share access. And even then, people thought it was "unprofessional" to use the keyboard. I got criticized by my boss for doing it, once - because it came to his attention because the secretary got upset because I asked her to do precisely what I advocated in the rant - function not as the originating typist but as the one to convert it from plain text computer printout to standard typed document format.

It's the same reason that I know that Col. Killian, GWB's commander back at TANG, certainly was not a typist. I didn't know the man, but I know the type - and that type of man didn't do keyboarding back then. It was a sexist thing with them. The memos attributed to him would not have been typed by him. And his secretary said that she didn't type them either. Which as we know is perfectly true because they were not composed by Col. Killian, and they were not typed in his office back in the early 1970s on any machine that an ANG would have had, or would even have bothered to use even if you gave one to them. They were, as you know, ponied up in 2004, or 2003 at the earliest, with a view to embarrassing President Bush. By someone who wasn't aware of the visible differences between typewritten documents and those produced by the default settings of Microsoft Office.


46 posted on 04/29/2011 4:18:04 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (DRAFT PALIN)
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To: conservatism_IS_compassion

You are right about much. I remember the days where perfect typing was very important since you had to erase several carbons so even one or two boo-boos were not good. I recall many times have to redo papers because of a large mistake (e.g., typing a few lines from a sentence below) or because of a boss’s revision. Cut and paste is a godsend!

However, people today think because they can wordprocess that they can do their own work and I think there is a great deal more error in today’s newspapers and even in legal documents that one did not see in years past. I blame it on the lack of professionals who are producing the product.


47 posted on 04/30/2011 1:17:15 PM PDT by Paved Paradise
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