As the big day approaches…

Here’s a quiz/puzzle for those of you who haven’t guessed why I’m able to dispense the following advice:

I’ve seen people who are 20 that act “old.” It’s like they have sparkling wrapping paper all around an empty box. Then there are the people in their 70’s who still have a young outlook on life. The spirit inside sparkles but the wrapping is just a bit wrinkled. 

If you already know, (DJ, Vickie, B.L., Lydia, Robert…) don’t spoil the fun with an answer!

How old do you think I am?

I always thought the glasses in the picture on my profile, in Gravatar, would be a dead giveaway.  🙂 

I took a typing class in Junior High school using this

My first typewriter was similar to this

When I became a secretary, I used a typewriter like this one — only it was black instead of green:

It was hard, learning how to type on an electric instead of a manual typewriter, and someone had to teach me how to change out the ball to have a different font.

The next year, I received the new and improved model, one with correct-tape built in.  That was another learning curve.  But, hey! No more messy Liquid Paper! (or so I thought).

By that time, I’d become quite a Liquid Paper artiste, though, mixing white with another color that exactly matched the fine linen business paper used for writing letters.  Unfortunately, I still had to use this, too, and at times the carbon copies required a good slathering of liquid paper:

When you needed to make a copy, you put this in between the pages and hoped to God that you didn’t make a mistake.

The first xerox machine didn’t do color copying.  You put the paper on the glass and chose the number of copies.  Then you used a separate rack to collate.

Imagine having to collate 20 copies of a 100 pages of a report?  That took most of a day to do or, if you had to (God forbid) have color pages and/or cover, you had to take your order to a print shop.  I’ve seen engagement rings cheaper than what print shops had to charge.

It was my job to clean the drum, do the light maintenance on the Xerox machine, and fish out paper stuck in various crevices of the machine.  Someone  in the office had to do it, and I was the only secretary who didn’t have a meltdown when the technician tried to teach it to us.  

BUT!!!!!  Making a copy was far easier than using carbon paper to make copies.

About 9 years later, I got a job with a company that had one of the first commercial computers.  It looked something like this, only older, and you had to “squash” the 2-foot wide disks.

I was told by my boss that it replaced all but 3 off the office staff. 

In an office that once had 25 people

One of its jobs was to amass accounting data and spit out “key cards.”

My first computer was purchased from Radio Shack, during my 3rd year of college, when the people who worked there actually knew the intimate details about what they were selling.

The 5 inch floppy disk held 15 pages and the instructions had to be programmed in before you started typing.  However, it was a lot better than using a typewriter to type an entire page, finding a word missing, and then having to type the page all over again.

This was my printer, one that typed out the pages at a about 50 words per minute.

My typing speed is about 90WPM.

After 4 years of college, my first full-time job was receptionist.  Yes, my first job was lower in skill level than the job I had before going to college.  Around that time the joke was  a joke going around:  There were Ph.D.’s  pumping gas at full-service stations just to find a job.  I met one of them once, and he didn’t think the joke was very funny.  His area of expertise was art history.

The government office I worked in had interoffice email state-wide, and my printer spit out the pages at a speed faster than I could type.

A mere 5 years after graduation, I found a job where I could use a B.S. in rehab psychology. People hand wrote information onto the forms.  If you ever saw my handwriting, you’d know why that wasn’t a good idea.   I used Word Perfect to create the first form that could be used to type the information on a 486 computer.


I now have a job that someone with my college degree should be doing; one that once took two people being supported by an administrative secretary, a typist, and a file clerk.   

But that was “then” and this is “now,”

where it’s standard for one person to do the work of 5 people.

Let that sink in.

I have a computer that holds terabytes of information, and a color printer in my office that scans/faxes/prints pages front and back that is the size of my old Daisy Wheel printer. 

Most of my printing is done through the office copier/scanner/fax machine that can print out 100 color pages in less that 2 minutes. 

I can use computers and printers quite well.  Just don’t ask me to buy an iPhone.  I’m…I’m just not there yet.

So then….how old do you think I’m going to be this month?

The winner of this quiz/puzzle will get a Hooray.  🙂 

I can afford more than that.