Typewriters for the Clueless Office Drone

margin levers on IBM Selectric®

Back in ye olden days, when the latest boy band members were just a gleam in their daddies' eyes; people wrote business letters, essays, and even personal correspondence on a device called a "typewriter." We suspect that if you wanted information on how to use these devices, along with 8-track players and rotary-dial telephones, you'd be wise to ask someone who has actually used one a time or two; not the likes of  eHowian Richard Kalinowski (aka James Gapinski), who we rather suspect has only seen a typewriter in a classic movie or perhaps an antique store. Regardless of the lack of any experience doing so, however, we found Richard attempting to explain "How to Set Margins on a Typewriter" at BizFluent.com... of course (it's at ItStillWorks.com these days).

Gapinski / Kalinowski cited two sources for his opus, one of which was Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"; the second was a home economics textbook. Of course there aren't any useful references for typewriters on-line, though there are some useless ones... Whatever the case, Richard started out with some flowery prose (he was, after all, a MFA student in creative writing):

"The typewriter represents a simpler, often idealized time in writing. Before globalization and the Internet, writing was a more personalized endeavor."

We fail to see what globalization has to do with anything, but it was a nice $EO keyword back when this crap was posted. Once he got the prose poetry out of the way, Kalinowski / Gapinski launched into the instructions – but for what machine, we'll never know. You see, apparently Richard / James thought that typewriters were standardized, which is about as far from the truth as possible. Not only were there both manual and electric typewriters, different makers had different layouts for the keyboards. Sure, the keyboard was QWERTY, but the other stuff? There were owner's manuals for that.

Richard did, for instance, say to "Press and hold the margin-set lever on the right-hand side of the typewriter carriage. The margin-set lever is often located next to the larger carriage release lever--the lever you depress when you want the cylindrical carriage to move back to its starting position." We think these instructions may be for a manual -- the kind with a manual carriage return (not "carriage release") and a bell that goes "ding" when you reach the end of a line. And then there's this utter bullshit: "Some typewriters have rulers built into the carriage, while you may need to hold a tape measure up to other models for a precise margin..."

Was he kidding? Or just stupid? Or perhaps this will be of use (though probably not):

"Press and hold the margin-set lever on the left-hand side of the typewriter. This is often the only lever on the left-hand side of the typewriter."

Ummm, yeah, probably a manual – but even then, there was usually an indent marker somewhere in there. Whatever the case, Kalonowski's total unfamiliarity with typewriters is revealed because he says exactly nothing about electric typewriters which, as shown in the image, usually had margin markers instead of a "margin-set lever"...

The sad fact is that, on even the most rudimentary manual or electric typewriter, the margin keys were pretty obvious and margin keys were labeled on manuals. But Kalinowski (not to mention Gapinski) wouldn't know that because he'd never used a typewriter. Still, he had the gall to try to tell someone else how to use one: that's all we needed to call him our Dumbass of the Day.

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