c. 1880 – c. 1990 · offices & plazas worldwide · supplanted by the personal computer
she was the person between the writer and the page. in offices she sat at a desk no larger than the machine itself, with a stenographer's pad to her left and a stack of carbon paper to her right. she typed sixty to eighty words a minute, sometimes a hundred. she made an original and three copies; the topmost was crisp, the bottom one blue and ghostly. in some firms the carbons were called sheilas and the originals catherines. she could read shorthand back to herself in the dark.
in the plazas of mexico city, oaxaca, lima, lisbon, the typewriter sat outside under an awning with the machine in front of her — a remington, an olivetti, an underwood. she typed the letters of the people who could not write them: tax appeals, declarations of love, requests for forgiveness, a son's letter to a mother he had not seen in twenty years. she charged by the page and corrected the spelling without comment. she had a small box for receipts and a smaller one for tips. she was, very often, the only literate person in a customer's life.
the personal computer took the office in the 1980s. the typing pool was dissolved into a single column on the budget called "equipment." the plaza typists held on longer; a few are still working today in the centro of mexico city. they are old. their machines are older. the letters they type are mostly forms — but, sometimes, still, a love letter for someone whose hands have begun to shake.
field note · the carbons darkened with age, blue going purple going grey. the originals stayed white. that is not a metaphor.