I had to try and
think of several catchy titles for this post. Titles are very important and I
stress over the creation of them, much as I stress over every other goddamned
piece of minutiae in my life. This is why I have a head full of bats, moth
balls and cinders.
Anyway, JC was
telling one of his epic stories yesterday. When JC tells a story, it is
awesome. Truly; it’s like listening to God. He can make you cry, but more often
he makes me laugh and he really had me howling yesterday about one of his wives
who got all puffed up at him during a tent revival. He was on the other side of
the tent. She thought JC “was a-lookin’ at the choirmistress,” which would have
been a neat trick, since the choirmistress was not in his line of sight. He saw
his wife “swell up, like a puffer toad, and start cussin’,” although he
couldn’t hear her. Ten years with the woman and he knew what was fixin’ to
happen. In his words, “I grahbbed mah Bahble, went straht out the back o’ that
tent, got in mah truck, and drove 165 miles without stoppin’.”
YEEHAAA! Ah'm outta heah!
His accent is pure
west Texas and pretty, but his expressions are all pure JC. When we lived over at
Happy Acres, he asked the particularly asinine Mr. Pimp My Ride, who festooned
his bicycle with tin foil, thinking it put him in competition with the true bad
asses who drove the hopped up Camaros and Chargers, before the FBI got them, with custom paint jobs, rims
and 20k sound systems, if he was an Astronaut. “What yo mean, Cracker?” JC and
I were standing in the House's hall, when this took place. When Mr. PMR said that, I
looked at my feet. JC just said, “Cause a' ahll that spay-ace bah-tween your eyes.” He really emphasizes the drawl, when he's being particularly snarky. Now, I'm looking at the ceiling.
I hustled the two of
us on out of there before Mr. PMR realized he’d been made fun of, but that was the
thing. He was easy meat. He never got it. There were about 4 or 5 of us who got
away with all kinds of shit like that. But that’s not what this is all about
and I’ve really digressed. While JC was telling the hilarious story of his late
wife who pulled the puffed up toad act at church, my mind hit on and then filed
away for today’s #Row80 the topic of ta-da “The Evolution Of The Carriage
Return.”
I’m sure
there’s been tons of horribly boring, or not so boring articles written on this
fascinating evolution. Back in the day, when we all learned to type, I learned
to type in some old sourpuss’s class in my sophomore year in high school. I sat
next to Steve Tersigni and Kevin Phillips, who always somehow managed to be in
my classes and make them fun. Our teacher made us type to horrible songs like
“Turkey in the Straw” and that’s all I remember. Except the god-awful racket of
all of the keys hitting the carriages and the sound of all of us hitting the
carriage returns. It sounded like siege engines at war.
I typed 35
words a minute from the age of 15 and never went near another typewriter if I
could help it. The only other thing that sounded remotely that horrible was the
sound in my 1st year Music Theory Class at SJSU with Dr. Brent
Heisinger, where we all had “ear training,” or some shit. There were 25
music majors, non-piano majors, in a room full of out-of-tune pianos and we were
supposed to play “chords.” What we played was a bunch of noise. Dr. Heisinger,
being the wonderful, hip, cheerful guy, would holler, “almost! Once again!”
Once again,
what?! It sucked. Even if we all played the same thing it sucked. The pianos
hadn’t been tuned since the Punic Wars. Well, my ear got trained, or maybe it
already was. I digress. So, after wandering around in the music biz and then
marrying the chucklehead who believed the piccolo fairy was going to come and
turn me into piccoloist and that didn’t happen, it was back to school and
computer science for moi.
An amaze-balls
thing happened in the 20 years since I’d been around a typewriter. Number one,
there weren’t any. Number two, there were these cool things called keyboards
now and they didn’t clack as much and you could work up a pretty good head of
steam on them. My typing speed improved. I was still a bit confused by some of
the names on the keys, but that stuff sorts itself out.
Off I went to
work at IBM, and further sortage occurred. IBM IT Support in 1995 was a
warehouse of the weird, old, halt and lame. We had some older systems, that hadn’t
worked out, and lots of applications that only few clients used, as well as all of the big, mainstream stuff. If the client
wanted to pay for it, we would supported it. Some of us became eclectic masters of
the bizarre, others stayed with the mainstream. And until the telephony system
was put in place, you never knew what you were going to get on the other end of
the phone when it rang.
These are actual calls, not verbatim, but real nonetheless.
"Hey! My fat ass-wife sat on my printer and mashed a bunch of buttons; now it won't work." After a few hours noodling with this and brainstorming with other engineers, solution? Mash a bunch of buttons. This was back in the day of Printer Hell, when no one had any printer that resembled any other printer.
“Hello? My
screen wants me to press the ‘ANY’ key. I don’t have one of those.” Simple
enough. “Press your space bar, the letter “A” It doesn’t matter.”
“Hi! This here
XYWrite is telling me to press the NEXT button. I ain’t seeing that.”
Again,
analogous to, “Enter,” and simple to fix.
But along with
the weird WORD 6.0 for MAC O/S (which no longer exists) which was probably the worst program ever, the
AmiPro, Word Pro, Lotus 123, Word Perfect, (now owned by Corel) there was one product that we.
Never. Figured. Out. If we ever did, and were able to execute the damned thing,
it probably would have blown up the entire Universe. We spent months on it. Not
a bunch of engineers all out. It was this one call, one guy. I didn’t even get
the call.
But we spent
weeks trying to get an answer for this guy. He was trying to install something.
Some kind of Word processing program. It was probably so old it was used back
in the days when you had to turn on the computer and install the brain before
you could use it. That was some rockin’ shit back then. 1984, I remember kind
of seeing those at the University of Michigan along with the Halloween screens.
High tech, cutting edge.
This poor
schlemiel is stumped because he can’t find the “Go” key. Sounds kind of like
“Enter,” only “Enter” isn’t working. We actually had the manual for that
software package. It, by God said to press the “Go” key, only there’s no
fucking GO key. We start calling other offices, we’re trying to get a hold of
the manufacturer, which is no longer in business; they’ve been eaten up by
MicroShit. We. Never. Solved. It. So, I put that one in the Unsolved case.
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