Old School

Early friday morning, I woke to a text message from our accountant, saying she had some documents she needed to send me.  I asked if she could just email it, but she said she doesn't have an email, but that she could fax it instead.  So I shuffled downstairs, to our study area to turn on the fax machine.  (I always unplug everything, not only because I'm afraid of fire caused by faulty sockets, but also because of global warming.)

While waiting for her fax, I went to the kitchen to warm up croissants and to pour myself a glass of soy milk.   I was just in the act of getting out the butter dish and jar of orange marmalade, when the phone rang, and I heard the fax machine kick in.  I put the warm croissants, butter, marmalade and milk on a tray, and placed it on the table near the computer where the fax was hooked up.  (Whenever we got a fax, it went straight to the computer where it got stored as jpeg files.) The transmission ended while I was half-way through breakfast.   I clicked on the folder where the fax was stored and looked at what she sent.

I suddenly realized what she truly meant when she said she doesn't have an email.  She really didn't have an email, in the truest sense of the word.  She sent me documents that were typewritten, using a machine that had a reusable ribbon.  The kind that my dad let me practice my touch typing way back in sixth grade.

Her small office that was annexed to her house should have clued me in.   There are tall piles of paper on every surface imaginable.  (It's a fireman's nightmare!)  Her desk is the wooden kind reminiscent of the 70s and her chairs are the old-fashioned leather swivel chairs.  No computer in sight, just calculators and a typewriter.  Whenever she needed to give us a receipt on the fly, she wrote it in her neat penmanship.   It's similar to my Mom's and my grandmothers, uniform and legible script with a discreet flourish.  (My penmanship doesn't have enough flourish, but it's the same old fashioned, uniform script that my Mom and the nuns at school impressed on me.)

She is very old school.

As I went through the documents she sent me, I was tickled pink as I read them.  How often does one receive typewritten (as opposed to encoded and printed) letters nowadays?