Shorthand and Other Dinosaur Skills!

12/12/2013

Shorthand - are you serious?  Yup.  Back in the "olden" days when we were still using manual typewriters (remember those?), any secretary worth her money took dictation.   Proving your skill levels went hand-in-hand with looking for a job. Taking a typing test wasn't too bad but having to take test dictation while you were already in hyper mode, was really tough.  And you never knew if the person dictating talked fast, slow, loud or soft.  So many variables and so much riding on getting that dictation right!

About the time I was in high school the old shorthand method, Pittman, was taken over by the Gregg system which they are probably still using today, although to be honest I haven't checked.  As part of my majoring in business in high school, I had daily classes in both shorthand and typing.  Before we all got lazy and went the way of electric typewriters, most people who typed for a living had very strong "pinkies", simply out of necessity.  You had to apply quite a bit of pressure to the keys on the right and left of the typewriter, hence strong pinkies.

I graduated from high school in 1967 and had one year of college where I was majoring in business administration, so I had more typing and shorthand classes. Sometime in my late 20's or so, I convinced my sister to take a shorthand class with me at the local junior college.  She was a good sport and I appreciated her coming with me, even though she had no interest whatsoever in shorthand, but together we still managed to have some fun.

I haven't used shorthand since probably 1974 or 1975.  Even though there wasn't much market for people who could take shorthand, it was still considered part of employment agencies required testing.  Even though I don't use shorthand at work any longer, there are certain words and brief forms that I still use every day, and I have never forgotten them, and I still have my original shorthand book (and I have no idea why).  This is what shorthand looks like:

 

But shorthand is not the only office skill that has become obsolete.  Dictaphones which sat on every secretary's desk after fewer and fewer people could take shorthand, aren't quite so prevalent as they once were.  Now bosses either write out letters and memos on a legal pad or most of them simply do their own typing or maybe it's called keyboarding.  I'm not sure so don't quote me!

We also used a mimeograph machine to produce documents for the teachers to use in their classroom, and for their time the copies were pretty good.  Of course these machines were as big as a house and weighed as much too!

Now we have fast moving copiers, computers that tell you when you have misspelled a word and rather than take phone messages for someone all day long, we merely press a code, a few numbers and voila the message is on its way through the wires to the recipient.  

Happy Thursday.

P