After 3 weeks of our FORMER provider telling us that we’d have DSL up and running “tomorrow”, we finally dumped them and are now up and running with a different, better company. It’s a ton faster and I can FINALLY get back to the internet and my Blog! Yay!
So – I have a lot of reading up to do on the blogs that I follow… I’ve got a lot of catching-up there and I also need to start writing on my blog again. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with you all.
I’ll start everything off by reminiscing about printing. I was at work and two things caught my attention. I was plotting some 42x30 drawings on an HP Laser plotter, and I had just printed out a few sets of .pdf color renderings of a large project that I'm in charge of this spring. The 42x30 drawings are chock full of construction information… plans, sections, elevations, details, schedules, notes, etc. All of this type of info is created using AutoCAD, not hand drawn (that’s an observation for another time), and as the info is sent to the plotter, it spews out these huge sheets of info at a rate of 3 or 4 every 10 minutes. Likewise, the .pdf renderings were shooting out at 2 or 3 a minute.
Like I said, the capabilities revolving around the information involved here are a discussion for another time, but as I stood there watching these documents being produced, I was suddenly 
whisked back to 3rd or 4th grade when I was helping a teacher’s aide (remember those?) make some dittos for a class. I remember the purple-ish / blue-ish print that the pages all had. If you picked up the dittos when they came out of the machine too soon, they were kind of still “wet” and could smear and get all over your hands. They also very warm when you first picked them up and if it was a cold morning, it was great to hold them close to you to warm up a bit.
But – nothing compared to the smell. I remember that we would grab the new dittos and hold them up to our faces and breathe deeply. I suppose that these days we would be accused of free-basing ditto toner, and we’d all be suspended because of the zero tolerance policies. But, man, if I we’re able to get a good whiff of ditto smell today, I’d be standing once again in the office helping the aide print dittos for the upcoming class that day.
2 comments:
My mom was a teacher. She started in the mid '70s and I remember finding those purple ditto carbon thingies were always mixed in with her school books and papers. I remember the smell and the greasy way the ink felt on my fingers.
PS I was away for three weeks, no internet. I feel like I've lost all of my readers and need to catch up big time. You'll get to it all :)
Tales Of A Fourth Grade Nothing
Ditto Machines. Ahhhhhh, that takes me back :) .
They touched all the senses...
1. Sight - the bluish blurry tone
2. Smell - who can forget
3. hearing - the sound of the machine cranking out those wonderful sheets
4. feel - as you mentioned the dampness of a freshly printed page
5. taste... ok maybe not all 5
Of course there was the weird kid in class that ate paper, worms and anything else we dared hime too). I'm sure he/she would be able to talk about the unique tastes that danced about their palates after ingesting this "unique" cuisine. Maybe he would describe it as acerbic or acrid. Or maybe Mellow, Nectarous or even Piquant
I remember the movie "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" had a scene where the students received copies of a test or assignment created by the Ditto machine and everyone of them proceeded to "sniff" the paper.
Are these things still legal? Does ebay have any :)
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