Work faster. Impress Julie. Learn to type.
My first day as an advertising copywriter started only a few days after leaving school.
I’d just turned eighteen. I was in the big city.
Well, Leeds was big to me.
It was the early eighties.
The personal computer hadn’t been invented yet.
Your laptop was something you encouraged your cat to sit on. Or your makeshift table for a TV dinner.
Anyway, in this prehistoric age, copywriters wrote copy by hand, on paper.
(I still do. But that’s another article.)
They handed their copy to the ‘creative secretary’ to type.
This was always a woman and her job was to do the admin for the creative director.
However, she also typed copy.
She didn’t want to.
Typists were, to her, beneath her pay grade.
So, as a copywriter needing my copy typing, I was faced with a Julie – my creative secretary was called Julie – to whom I had to be extra nice.
“Would you mind typing this, Julie. The client is in reception so it’s quite urgent. Pretty please.”
This was difficult enough but when a demotivated Julie made typing errors, I had then be even more pleasant and bring coffee to Julie to encourage her to get out the correction fluid (Tip-ex).
After six months of this charade, I’d had enough.
I thought to myself, ‘Why don’t you learn to type?’
This was a crazy idea in those days.
Typing was something that only women – and police officers – did.
I fell into neither camp, of course, but I could see the potential of this crazy thinking.
So, I looked where I could learn.
In Leeds, we had so-called ‘night school’ courses. After hours classes at the local community centre.
Typing was one of the most popular courses so I enrolled.
On a dark December night, I found myself in a room with about twenty women.
We all sat in front of so-called ‘manual’ typewriters. In other words, the keys weren’t electric. Monstrous machines made from metal as thick as a Volvo’s door panel.
To type a letter involved a hefty strike on a metal key which flew up and bashed a ribbon dyed with a black and a red stripe, so you could choose a colour. And when you finished a line, a bell clanged.
Typing quickly was physically hard – not to mention loud – but you had to be able to type about 30 words a minute (I think) to pass the RSA Grade 1 exam.
This included Tip-exing out your mistakes.
Making mistakes becomes such an inconvenience, you just quickly learn to become more accurate.
Along with most of my classmates, I passed the exam in a few months.
Back in the agency, the production manager in the creative department was very impressed with my enterprise.
He arrived at my desk with an Olivetti typewriter for me to use. I was now self-sufficient.
Julie was thrilled because her workload instantly dropped. On one occasion I think she bought me coffee.
Fast forward to now.
There are no copy typists and most secretaries don’t do documents for you, unless your title is CEO.
Everyone types for a large proportion of every day and yet very few people can type properly – or ‘touch type’ as we pro’s call it.
This means they are slower and more likely to make mistakes – although these are easy to correct now.
The computer keyboard is the main tool of anyone who works in an office. More prevalent than the pen. The universal user interface.
So, wouldn’t it be a good idea for everyone to think about going on a course?
Sadly, it won’t earn you an Olivetti – or a coffee from Julie – but it will make it much faster and more enjoyable to produce anything that involves, well, words.
