The Last Typewriter Repairman

While attending Trade School in the early ‘90’s I ended up taking an outside job for the one semester when there was no Work-study job for me and I accepted a part time position at a business called Cascade Computers. While they did so some work on computers, the majority of the workers were involved with typewriters. Repairing, maintenance and cleaning typewriters was a big contract that once was a major money maker involving several businesses but they all ended up closing down one by one until only Cascade Computers was left servicing the Typewriter Industry.

At first I was embarrassed to work on the old fashion machines and was longing to work with computers. But once I finally settled down long enough to watch the expert guy put the pulley spring back on the rollers using two long skinny crochet hooks I could tell there was real skill involved. He was able to dig into the guts of that contraption and fix things again with the incredible dexterity. Most computers are quite simple to service but if you have to take apart an electric typewriter there will be lots of parts and pieces.

These were top of the line IBM Selectric Machines that were not like your regular Typewriter. These had a Golf Ball with letters instead of keys and no reaching up to push the carriage back for each line, instead the golf ball moves back and forth. These devices were state of the art in their day but when I got there they were already well on the way to extinction. The thing I remember most about them was the humming noise they made even while unattended that made them sound more like a refrigerator than a computer. And that was nothing compared to the noise they made when the worker started typing.

The job of cleaning these dodo-birds consisted of several steps requiring the use of toxic Chemicals to treat the different kinds of rubber on the rollers and spacers. This only added to the overall discomfort of having to disturb workers in their office to clean the thing and then their eyes would get bigger and bigger when the smell of those chemicals hit their noses. Usually I went by myself to the various places on the list of units to be cleaned. For the big Jobs we would fire up the old van out back and get all the workers together for an assembly line approach.

The funniest part was trying to find the typewriter at most places and then when we finally did find it, it didn’t need cleaning because it hadn’t been used. There were some places that really did need cleaning and then we earned our money but most of the time we felt like the Maytag repairman.

I love to kid around by saying I was also the Last Railroad Gandy Dancer. Sure there are people who still do that same job today but they never heard the songs or felt the thrill of working on the traveling System gangs way back in the last Century . I even go so far as to tell the joke that I will someday be the last computer Systems Analyst but when it comes to the Last Typewriter job, I swear it’s true. Seriously, when was the last time you saw a working Typewriter?