The seductive allure of my Valentine.

Pardon my miss-use of 'your' below :-

 

It may seem twee to be writing about my Valentine typewriter on Valentine's day, but then again my disdain for my Valentine has been rather well documented.  

So it may surprise a few people that I revisited the Valentine, which hiding at the back of my collection, and found myself being both frustrated, and then seduced by this machine. 

*  *  *

It all started late last year on Facebook. Or more accurately, with a friend from my past. 

This friend had been seeking me out on Facebook, but I wanted to have absolutely nothing to do with them. With a click of the block button they were gone - out of my life, and I expected them to be out of my mind forever.

But they weren't out of my mind. The situation bugged me for days, and after a little while I decided that it was time to write to them, and express my frustrations and hurt and ask them not try to contact me again.

So, I rolled out my Valentine. I had mixed feelings of anger and sadness, and the Valentine seemed to be the right keyboard to take it out on. Before long I had paper loaded into the machine, and I was bashing out a note to my now rather ex friend.

The Valentine however, didn't survive the length of the letter. Its scratchy carriage continued to grind and moan at every press of the key, and the escapement occasionally jammed and condensed letters together to form a blob of words. 

By the second page, the machine gave up the ghost. One of the bearings that I had painfully re-inserted 6 months ago shot out of the carriage unexpectedly mid travel. But I continued to type on the machine with the carriage wobbling around in a rickety motion until the letter was done.

I finished the letter and pushed it into an envelope. The next day I grabbed all of my outgoing mail, and headed to my nearest Australia Post mailbox. But before I did, I left the letter typed on the Valentine behind on my desk.

I was now left with a wounded Valentine. After I'd previously re-assembled the carriage I had never been happy with the action of the machine, and I just had a feeling that it wasn't trustworthy and that feeling proved to be right. 

I mulled over the mechanism and I couldn't quite figure out what had happened. It seemed physically impossible for the machine to dump a bearing mid movement, and I couldn't see any signs to tell me what had actually happened. The best I could figure out was that bearings may have been worn down, or that the retainer had jammed in the middle of the movement - forcing the bearings to jam and push out the side of the retainer and shoot out of the typewriter.

Obviously this was going to need the bearings to be once again re-inserted. But I just didn't have the heart to do it again, so I tucked the Valentine back into my cupboard until I had the patience and the mindset to do so. 

*  *  *

A somewhat casual auction. Much more relaxed than ebay.

 In January I flicked through a catalog  for an antiques auction over in Woolloongabba and spotted an interesting Art Deco table that had been poorly photographed, but showed some real potential. I popped down on the day of the auction, and discovered quite a beautiful table. 

While the auction progressed I picked through the bits in the store-room for a couple of hours until the table come up for auction. I bid - and won - a stunning 1930's dining table for a whopping $30. It would have been $20, but a dealer put in a half-arsed $5 bid against my first bid, just to see if he could score it cheap. I'd budgeted for significantly more than $30 for this table, which was pretty obvious to the dealer after I countered his bid within seconds, and he dropped out out of the running as he wasn't really interested.

Furniture wasn't really selling that day, and most of the dealers that were there were looking for little things that could be sold at markets or along with other items in their stock. Oddly several sets of antique bottle openers sold for more than the table did. Jewelery seemed to be the hot item, while my table was the only table to sell for the day.

While I was digging around the storage room, I discovered an Olivetti Dora buried in a job lot. The machine worked brilliantly, but was in a horrible state. The case was water-damaged, and some of the plastic had fused to the plastic of the Dora's Shell - staining it yellow and making it appear as though it had been burned. Also along with the typewriter in the job-lot was a marvelous label maker.

I bid, and before long I was the excited owner of a Dora and a label maker with about 20 fresh rolls of tape for a bank-breaking $10.

I grabbed that, and a few other trinkets that I'd bought, loaded up Ruby the Exxy and headed for home. 

*   *   *

 When I bought the Dora, I have other ideas than adding it to my collection. I could have spent hours fruitlessly trying to do something to the shell of the Dora to make it look nice again, or.... I could just use it as a parts machine. When I got it home and typed on it a little I was surprised by how well it worked. It was actually quite a nice typewriter. So I reconsidered my course of action for a moment, but then just through to myself - 'the world isn't going to miss one ugly Dora', and I promptly started to deconstruct the machine's shell. 

From a mechanical point of view, this Dora was pretty good. However, it had been filled with silt and muck - most likely from being stored in someone's leaky shed, and was most going to need a lot of cleaning. Frankly, I couldn't be bothered scrubbing the whole thing out. I flipped the machine over, and after dropping out no more than 8 bolts and two springs, I pushed some levers aside and I had the part I needed. 

 There can be only one! (swings sword).

I speak of course, of the entire carriage. Not just the rails, not just the platen, not just the paper table etc. But the entire array.

I spoke to John on the phone about what I was doing. Speaking from his experienced Olivetti typewriter mechanic point of view, his comment was blunt: "Fools rush in, where angels fear to tread".

John was right, of course. I had no idea of the complexities involved with relocating an entire carriage into a new machine. But I sure didn't have any intention of putting myself through the grief of relocating the bearings again - particularly as there was clearly something very wrong with them.

But the job turned out to be quite simple. I ripped the Valentine's carriage out, and plonked the Dora's back into place quite quickly. I even gave everything a scrub along with a grease and oil change while I was at it, so all the important bits were well looked after and running very smoothly. it all seemed to be such a simple repair. I flipped it over, and before shoving the shell back on, I gave it a test run.

Of course, nothing worked. 

Okay... so... where do I start fixing this.

So, I flipped the machine over gain and loosened the bolts, screws and bits and pieces. Progressively things sort of worked as I fiddled with them, but adjusting things in one direction seemed to put something else out. So soon it got to the point where it occurred to me that the entire carriage array must need some kind complicated adjustment procedure performed to ensure that everything lined up correctly.

After a little bit of thinking, I thought I had come up with an idea on how to do this complicated adjustment procedure. I flipped over the machine and loosened off the 6 bolts retaining the carriage array to the side, then pressed down hard on the carriage while re-tightening the bolts with retaining this compressed state.

Aaaaaaaaaaand......

The Valentine worked perfectly.

Well, except for a couple of things that I had 'adjusted' earlier, which I had to screw back to where they originally had been.

I quickly bolted everything back together, chucked in the new ribbon that I had been using previously in the machine (I use a mostly dry ribbon while testing repairs) and give it a bit of a burl.

And you know what? After being serviced, cleaned and adjusted to death, this carriage would have to be the smoothest moving carriage I have ever found on an Olivetti. And I mean... this was SMOOTH. The plastic shell of the case which reverberated bumps and grinds previously, was now astonishingly quiet. Only my Hermes 3000 machines are smoother and quieter.

This was an outcome that was completely unexpected. So I quickly pushed in a few fresh pages of letterhead paper, and turned out a couple of long overdue letters to a couple of members of the typosphere.


And you know what? I actually quite enjoyed my time with my Valentine. There's some aspects to this machine that are a bit unrefined, but largely I found this typewriter to be a very competent typewriter. It isn't the pinnacle of typewriter engineering, but it was a surprisingly comfortable, quiet and stylish machine to use.

I'm not in love. Oh no.

But this is one Valentine that I'd be happy to go a round with twice a day, and three times on Sunday. (my overseas readers may not quite catch onto what I'm saying there).

*   *   *

The letter that I typed before I repaired the machine still hasn't been posted. It sits in a box - maybe for life. I may find a moment to burn it and let go of the memories of a long passed toxic friendship. In the meantime, I've gained an appreciation for a beautiful Valentine.

P.S. I used the shift keys from the Dora - which were the more modern Lettera 32 square style, to replace the missing shift key. I also replaced the non missing shift key as well, so everything matched up.

Comments on comments on comments.

“I’m going to put a knife in your chest as you sleep, and burn your house down around you with your family still inside”

This wasn’t the first death threat I had ever received, but was the first I copped on facebook. Since that time I’ve received hundreds of threats to my life, wellbeing and reputation through the same website. Maybe even thousands of them. And all this has been because I have often stood up for the lesser privileged in our society.

I love the people of the typosphere – because of the similar interests that they have to me. Their respect and appreciation of the beauty of those writing machines, and the confidence that ‘typewriters’ are not yet an anachronism. They also understand the passion and wonder of writing – and the places that the written word can take you, along with the freedoms that it brings. Some write about scrapbooking. Some write about guns. But they do so with absolute freedom.

The more I read from the people in the typosphere – the more understand their appreciation of that beauty, and the more I feel at home.

But two blogs this week talked about the context an ugliness in our online society, and quickly dropped it into my typosphere world with a thud. Firstly; John Birmingham (yes, he of the ‘throw the typewriter off the bridge’ fame) wrote a very pointed blog about anger on the internet – and in internet blog comments and forums. Later, I read a typecast form Word rebel over at their “Conversations with my ID blog” about the scathing criticisms they had copped on a writers website, in the comments on an article that had been posted about people still using typewriters.

Many of these comments ranged from the stupid to the abusive. Almost every time someone writes an article in the media somewhere about typewriters, you’ll have someone ask rhetorically “Does anyone still make typewriter ribbons”? oddly ignorant to the fact that – if someone is still using a typewriter, there’s still ribbons being made somewhere.

But that obligatory stupid question is nothing compared to the inevitable hate lumped on ‘hipsters’, and how somehow typewriters have become a symbol of hipsterism. Again, this hated raised its ugly head in this discussion, and the people who feel the need to label others with such limited names, seemed to be the ones who were the least limited in their understanding of how the world works around them.

There were also plenty of people giving instructions on how people should get rid of those typewriters and start using computers. As though they felt like they were instructing their aging grandparents on the most basic tools of computer use, and fighting against an attitude that was against their beloved technology. I hate to say it, but the level of ‘stupid’ was high with these people, as they seemed to be ignoring that this discussion was taking place on the internet, over computers and advanced digital communication lines – with people who clearly knew how to use computers and were currently actually doing so.

The ‘Labelers’ – the people trying to bunch typewriter users into the ‘hipster’ stereotype (see what I did there?)  – give us an insight into what is really happening behind the scene. By grouping people into such groups, we often apply judgements onto them, and assign a criticism on an observed behaviour, which they then can tar the entire group with.

We all essentially do it. Dealing with lots of people individually is a difficult thing to do. So we often organise them in our heads with people of similar characteristics. But often when we do, we start to forget other traits of that person that doesn’t fit that stereotype.

Are you a Muslim? A black? A man? A gay? We all have these little stereotype groups organised in our heads. Heaven forbid if we have to deal with a Black gay male Muslim.

However, as much as we almost always mentally organise people like this, many of us also have judgements that we heap on these stereotypes, and turn them into negative stereotypes.

That’s the funny thing about the internet – it has allowed an even greater level of puritanicalism and self affirmation as people have been able to live out lives reading millions of articles that self confirm their convictions – without ever having to read someone questioning it. The internet has made knowledge sharing easy, and bullshit spreading even easier.

On top of that – armchair social commentators have become heroes in our society. They attract news every time they say something controversial, and as such many have many people mimicking the boldly judgementalism and black and whiteism that radio shock jocks, editorialists and Fox News commentators love to spew. Their messages are deceptively simple, and yet people live their lives and make powerful decisions based on them.

And to that end, the comments and abuse on the article that Word Rebel had written about have stemmed from such a puritanical, judgemental and often self-righteous place. People invest a lot of their self-esteem in having the media confirm their way of life. As such they feel a level of righteousness – yes, an almost religious ‘I’m on the right path, fear ye who deviate’ affirmation.

Some of you may be familiar with a website called ‘Ravelry’. It is a knitter’s website. They recently were talking about having a ‘Ravelympics’ on their website – in celebration of the Olympics, and suddenly found the United States Olympic Committee breathing down their necks about violation of their trademarks.

Before everyone was in full receipt of the facts , there was such a torrent of heat and scorn poured onto the USOC on the Ravelry website that I heard it described as a ‘Knitter’ storm’. There was a ferocious defence of their knitting activity, which relied heavily on preconceived ideas about themselves along with the USOC that had for a fair part been ill considered, and frequently factually incorrect.

 It is hard to understand where all this hatred and anger comes from on the internet. Understanding why you are hated for saying ‘Hey, I use a typewriter and I like it’, is difficult to understand. To us, it is something that makes us happy and forms an important part of our lives. But to have it hated by others – especially has it has absolutely no baring on them what-so-ever seems to make no sense.

But I have found comfort in understanding that this is because of their personal lack of self-esteem, that they need you to be just like them so that they can feel that they are actually living their life in the righteous and meaningful way. They haven’t managed to break their own personal happiness away from their need to feel accepted by a wider society.

It makes me sad to think about it like this, as I feel that they themselves haven’t found those things that they can enjoy that can give fulfilment in their lives, because they have limited themselves to a path that even the most minor things must align to – even if they are never likely to change the outcome of their own lives. And need the affirmation of others to feel good about themselves.

I can sit down and write a letter to someone in America, or the UK, or France, or even Ethiopia on a typewriter and enjoy it, no matter how much harder it is to do compared to doing it on a computer. They cannot. I’ll debate with them in discussions for as long as I feel comfortable, but ultimately – I intend to never let someone damage my own happiness.

Oh, and I’m not a hipster. I have no problem buying a t-shirt at K-mart.

Thanks for reading.