Page 8 - Nov 2022

My OOPS! File from t he On Typing, continued from page 2
Oct ober issue
I took the hint, bought a primitive word processing machine, and put my
1. Jim Moran owns the 30 plus year old typing ?skills? to work. It wasn? pretty. A friend who had
t
Triumph that was pictured in been an executive secretary and a good one, laughed at my floppy disc
word processor. She gave me an outdated, for her, Apple computer and
the Cars & Coffee article. I
a printer. Then she watched as I fell further into the abyss of
have no idea who do-it-yourself-ism.
Drummond is, or how I Soon, writing on legal pads, then transcribing the written word to the
managed to attach this name machine by fingers, seemed like an unnecessary redundancy. ( I had, had

to the photo. My apologies. a similar revelation years before when I discovered that I could save time
by not having to deal with my contact lenses and began to wear glasses,
2. In t he art icle about Bob instead.) I found myself with horror typing directly into a Word
document. Now, management began to expect that my work product
Slayden's Triumph It alia
would come in already typed and ready for production. I had worked my
2000, I managed to way up to becoming, not only my actual job title, but also my own
substitute the name Bill for secretary. This was progress???
Bob (Slayden) in a photo Each month when I work on MOTORING, I am reminded that I will never

caption. It's Bob not Bill be the typist that any of those long -suffering secretaries, who produced
page after page of clean copy, fixing my obvious errors as they tapped
shown in this photo.
along, were. In fact, I will never have the attention to detail that they
brought to work with them each day. At a remove of 60 years I am
humbled by their skill and their dedication to getting it right, because
missing the small things can become unexpected big and sometimes
consequential mistakes very quickly.
Automatic editing and spell check only go so far and often create even
more blunders with their automatic "assistance". I always find that once
the issue is published that I have produced , as the British comedian
Eddie Izzard says, what the sentence looked ?like in my mind ? ,
overlooking what was actually on the page, leaving it without correction.
3. The Dickens of a Holiday
The remedy for that is a new OOPS! Column debuting this month [
Brunch being held on opposite]. There, as a mea culpa, the errors of the past issue can be
December 10t h does not corrected in the current one.
end at 11PM but at 1 PM or I realize now that I should have paid more attention in high school when
thereabouts. What a told that being able to type , error free, ? Now is the time for all good men
to come to the aid of their country.? at 65 words per minute was going to
difference a 1 can make.
be important; but then, who could have anticipated that type or die
RSVPS are still required by 'would become the mantra of the 21st century and that even our thumbs
December 3rd. would have to get into the act, if, God forbid, we felt compelled to text

4. The Walk-around video ?Veni, vidi, vinci.? ? I came, I saw, but it was typing that conquered.
from the recent Monterey On average there are tens of thousands of words in MOTORING each
Car auctions did not make it month. I type them all.

into the issue, although there Please bear with me when you come across errors and let me know if you
think they are important enough to warrant a correction.
was a line in The News
section saying it was For all my good intentions, I fear I will never be a an agile kitten on the
keys.
included.
Cherie
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