The Oracle was reminiscing recently about a typing class he took during his school days and how, despite an ineffective teacher and a little peeking on his part, he still managed to become a speedy typist. Eventually.

Well, his reminiscing triggered my reminiscing, and I found myself thinking about the old Corona Standard that resided on a card table in the corner of our family room. My mom used it to type letters. My sister used it to type school reports. My brother used it to look terribly busy at his homework whenever it was time to do chores. (In fact, he was usually writing letters to Playboy or Mad Magazine.)

Being only in grade school, I didn’t have any use for it. In fact, I hated that thing. I hated its loudness, the way it went ding! at the end a line and then zzhUNK! when the return lever was pushed. I hated that the card table somehow amplified each keystroke, and yet I could still hear my sister’s nails clack as she typed. It was my job to dust the damn thing, which was a losing battle: the greasy innards ferociously clung to every speck of dust, every flake of eraser residue, every long hair that floated down from my sister’s head. It defied my best efforts at cleanliness and it invariably took a hunk of skin out of my fingers each time I reached into its innards to dust it.

When I turned twelve my mother gave me permission to use the Corona. I’m sure in her mind this was a rite of passage, a signal I’d reached a certain level of maturity and could be entrusted with blood-thirsty machines. But I still had no use for it and, since my brother and sister had grown up and moved out, the typewriter simply sat there gathering dust which I only pretended to clean.

By high school, my mother all but threatened to cut me out of her will unless I took a typing class. “If you can type,” she told me, “you’ll always have something to fall back on.” I had no idea what this meant, nor did I particularly care. I was not going to take typing, and that was that. (Ironically, it was something I typed in an email to her twenty years later that led her to cut me out of her will, but that’s a story for another day.)

I never typed a stroke until an old boyfriend upgraded to a shiny new IBM PS/2, and kindly gave me his old computer. It was a massive, MS-DOS based thing with dual 8-inch floppy disks that made up for its lack of RAM by heating my apartment year-round. Oh, it was as noisy — if not noisier — than the old Corona, whirring and chugging as it accessed the operating system on one disk and wrote data to the other. But it was a computer, and it was mine.

See, what distinguished my computer from a typewriter was its state-of-the-art 300 baud modem which let me access the World Wide Web and stay up all night chatting with the Sys-Ops of my favorite BBS’s. Lucky for me, data transmitted so slowly over a 300 baud modem that even my hunt-and-peck typing speed was more than fast enough.

Today, I’m surfing the web via cable modem and typing over 125 words per minute. Today, I’ve spent over six hours trying to rid my computer of a nasty virus and some spyware that mutate and bury themselves each time I think I’ve finally rid myself of them all. Today, my browser has crashed on me no less than nineteen times while my firewall kept spitting out warnings about attempted intrusions. Today, while the anti-virus program was scanning in the background, the computer froze up and then crashed while I was in another window writing what promised to be a damn fine short story, but which I lost because — like an idiot — I hadn’t saved it along the way.

I would give anything to have that clunky, dusty old typewriter because after a day like today, I’d love to throw it at my computer. I have no doubt which one would win.

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