Obsolete Technology for the Dummy Typist

Manual typewriter

Ahhhh, obsolete technology: the rotary phone, the eight-track tape player, the typewriter. In an age when many people don't even use physical keyboards any more, a typewriter seems "quaint" or "antique." Nonetheless, there are still people out there, such as Tom Hanks, who remember how to use one of the behemoth machines. Their number, however, includes neither some unknown internet fact-seeker nor eHow.com contributor Suman Medda. That Suman didn't know how to use a typewriter, however, didn't deter him from telling the world "How to Remove a Typewriter's Print Error"¹ – sort of.

Suman's ignorance of Royals and Olivettis (not to mention IBM Selectrics) is obvious from the get-go. Why else would someone introduce this topic with the moronic statement, "Typewriters were once a popular device for creating documents"? In reality, they were pretty much the only device for creating documents. Nevertheless, it gets worse: Medda's instructions began by telling us to

"Insert the correction paper into the typewriter. This usually requires using the roller on the side of the typewriter to insert the sheet on top of the original document."

Really? Use the "roller on the side"? Clearly this was written by someone who'd never used correction tape or Liquid Papr®; someone who had never made a futile attempt to re-align a sheet of paper in a typewriter after removing it! And what's this bull about?

"Set the typewriter to 'stencil' mode. This will turn off the ink, facilitating the use of the correction paper instead when required."

Why would you care, even if your typewriter had a stencil mode (which most didn't)? You're not going to use the so-called correction paper, anyway. Perhaps the best "information" Suman provided, however, was this little anachronism: "Use the space bar to move forward on the page and the delete key to move backwards." Ummm, Suman you flaming, ignorant dummy, typewriters didn't have DELETE keys; they had backspace keys! If you'd ever used one, maybe even seen one, you'd know that! For the typical eHowian sin of writing on a topic about which he knew jack before his "research" and still knows nothing about it, Suman Medda is our Dumbass of the Day.

¹ The original has been deleted by Leaf Group, but can still be accessed using the Wayback machine at archive.org. Its URL was    ehow.com/how_8665070_remove-typewriters-print-error.html

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