To get anything done in today’s world, we depend almost exclusively on microprocessors embedded in computers, smartphones and toasters.
But I started work when the peace and prosperity of mankind rested on the ability to communicate using a typewriter. With a typewriter, one could carve hitherto illegible handwriting into black type. Documents despatched to distant lands were now read with ice cold clarity by the recipient, even if they couldn’t understand its import. With the typewriter’s unmistakable clackity-clack sound, there poured out from every office worldwide, mountains of memos, missives, and communiques.
One had to be taught to type; it was a valuable skill.
Curiously, the ability to type was mysteriously designated as a female trait; males need not apply, unless they’re authors or journalists. Companies and governments set up vast pools of all female typists, who turned handwritten drafts, shorthand notes, or direct dictation, into legible documents. Stenographers (as they were called) who could convert dictation to error free documents with great speed, like my mother, were highly valued and sought after.
My mother commenced her career as a junior typist in one such typing pool, deep in the bowels of some Melbourne corporate entity. The best typists, or those displaying administrative talent, were promoted out of the typing pools to become secretaries to the great and powerful. Being one such fair maiden and fast typist, my mother soon scaled the lofty heights of an office atop one of the first skyscrapers in Collins Street, where she was secretary to a director of the mining company, Conzinc Rio Tinto.
My mother inhabited a world of thin white paper, black carbon sheets, and a firm belief that imperfection was definitely a mortal sin, if not a crime against humanity. Though errors might be verboten, it had to be acknowledged that by employing unusual cunning, combined with a brief lapse in concentration, an error could wheedle its way onto a page. On discovery, collective guilt applied to all hitherto typed words, with the entire page being untimely ripped from its typewriter carriage, executed without trial, and condemned to burn in the eternal fires of the municipal incinerator. When the souls of the deceased words promised to be error free, they were reincarnated afresh onto a virgin sheet of white paper, layered with multiple carbon copies.
When I started my engineering career in 1985, the curtain was about to fall on my mother’s world, but the actors were still on stage, and the lights were shining.
The Australian Army employed me, and although it had a more tolerant approach to the odd typing error, it put a high value on following regulation and rigid processes. It was unthinkable for typing to be done other than by an all-female typing pool, in a dark dungeon, guarded by a fierce, female, fire-breathing dragon.
To have a letter or report typed, one first boldly approached the half door dungeon entrance, bowed to the dragon, and passed a handwritten draft into her scaly claw. Through her horned rimmed spectacles, the monster looked down doubtfully on both the draft document and her prospective prey. Meanwhile, we bowed submissively, and uttered what we hoped were the correct incantations. Withdrawing backwards, as in the presence of royalty, we then turned and fled to avoid having our heads bitten off.
The following day, if we were lucky, a typewritten draft magically appeared on our desk.
If we found a mistake, we amended the typewritten draft using the prescribed dragon code, and then cautiously approached the monster a second time. Fortunately, since my mother had taught me some limited dragon language, I had a better-than-average chance of getting work typed without being blasted by the dragon, or losing any essential body parts. However, many colleagues were not so fortunate, being deficient in dragon arts, and their deprived upbringing having failed to teach them any dragon tongue.
The dragon guarding the army’s typing pool may have been an archaic disciplinarian, but she at least had the latest equipment. The women typed on electric golf ball typewriters that also recorded every stroke on a tape or floppy disc. If a document needed a minor amendment, the change could be made to the floppy disk recording, and the document automatically re-typed by the typewriter, thus saving labour. But by the time I left for Samoa in 1990, word processors had replaced the typewriter, the curtain had come down on that world, and the typing pools were fast evaporating.
Newly liberated from constant threat of torture and oppression by the ruling typists and their dragon mistresses, a techno-egalitarian regime arose. Now any unskilled bumpkin could effortlessly type and print as many copies as they wished. Much to the dismay of bourgeois dragons forced into early retirement at the sharp end of a few secretarial keystrokes, any peasant could now use the ubiquitous photocopier to produce countless copies without any training whatsoever.
However, at Leulumoega Fou, the typing regime was still in power, the stage lights were on, and there was no thought that the curtain might come down anytime soon. In contrast to the army’s electric typewriters, Leulumoega Fou had a few, old style, purely mechanical devices. However, the old machines were very reliable, virtually indestructible in Samoa’s climate, and completely unaffected by lack of electric power.
But typewriters do not multiply copies. At Leulumoega Fou, the Gestetner (Mimeograph) machine was the only method for producing worksheets. We needed worksheets, because the library, textbooks, films or slide presentations used by teachers in Australia or New Zealand, did not exist. Instead, writing notes on the blackboard for students to copy into their workbooks occupied much classroom time. According to Helen, some Samoan teachers thought this was the sole job of the teacher. The previous year, some teachers simply instructed a student to copy notes onto the board while the teacher went and smoked with friends, or slept in the library.
When I describe the wonders of the Gestetner to my adult children, I could be talking about something the ancient Sumerians used before inventing the wheel. But, for the hundred years before the availability of low-cost photocopying, the Gestetner reigned supreme over the short run printing world.
In the staff meeting one morning, Kenese informs us that Alani, the school secretary, provides the teachers with the secretarial service to produce worksheets. Alani will type our handwritten draft onto stencils, print them on the Gestetner, then collate, staple, and deliver them ready for classroom use.
So Kenese instructed us.
Helen dismisses Kenese’s direction, being already deeply scarred by her attempts to produce worksheets the previous year.
“Alani takes forever to do anything,” says Helen. “And by the time you get your worksheet, it’s full of mistakes.”
Both she and Tammy laboriously type up their own stencils, and sometimes get Alani to run off copies on the Gestetner.
But “Alani’s sloppy and sometimes tears the stencil,” says Helen. They prefer to bypass the Alani bottleneck and print, collate, and staple worksheets themselves.
Heather and I want to do things the right way, and think we should follow the principal’s directive. Aren’t we here to immerse ourselves in Samoan culture by doing things the Samoan way? We know that means taking some lows along with the highs; and while it’s easy to intellectually sip such ideals seated in the comfortable cultural armchairs of our palagi thinking, reality can be harsh.
If Alani had been as fast, diligent, and focused, as either my mother, or the army’s dragon dominated typists, this process might have worked. To Alani however, stories of error free work by fair maidens in tall towers, or buried in dungeons guarded by scaly green dragons, were all wild fantasies; bedtime fairy stories told to children, whose imaginations could effortlessly think three impossible things before breakfast.
As I approach the school office one morning, I hear shrieks of laughter from Mele standing in the doorway…
An excerpt from ENCOUNTER - A Journey into Chaos, Culture and Compassion, by Ian Reilly, a homeless book searching for a publisher. ENCOUNTER delivers culture shock in a page turner, upending comfortable beliefs about people, place, and purpose. Engaging deeply in the lives of real people like us—flawed, uncertain, vulnerable and sometimes frightened—ENCOUNTER uses true stories to enrich our lives by exploring the confluence of culture and worldview.