I Can't Imagine If I Made Our Undergraduate Group Research in 2006-2007 and My MBA Thesis Last 2013-2014 Using a TYPEWRITER
As a person who grew up in the 1990s, some parents considered the PC to be an "unnecessary luxury", as if it was like the latest video game console of that time. That's pretty much a categorical error. I remembered the typewriter which I call that paper-eating monster. One of the comments that some boomer parents make is, "You're just lazy! Back in our day, we used typewriter!" It can get worse when they start setting their own milestones as "standards of excellence". Well, many 19-20 year old people will be looking for their college degrees. What's to be proud about starting early if you didn't do much?
In high school, I even remembered having to write a journalism report with a typewriter. It was because we ran out of ink. Again, the same classic complain by "excellent parents" is, "Use a typewriter! Don't be lazy!" With the standards having been raised, would one want to go gardening with faulty tools? Would one want to iron their clothes the old-fashioned way? Would one want to still use ineffective detergent bars when there are better detergents? I even remembered how the typewriter caused by journalism reports to be bad. My thought patterns were frequently interrupted by the fear of having to rewrite everything all over again.
Fortunately, in college, there were more PCs. Doing my contribution to the practicum report was a lot easier in a way. It's not that I just sat down and do nothing. Instead, we could all check for errors. We had a panelist, a retired professor from the University of San Carlos, who raised her eyebrows and said, "You're using a computer now. Why is this full of typographical error huh?" I bluntly admitted that I drank some beer during the making of the final draft. I was rightfully berated after that! Still, the PC allowed us to proof-read before passing the work. That retired professor, before she retired, would always say, "Be thankful you aren't using a typewriter. If you were, you'd have more reasons to pass a bad report!"
I did take my MBA in 2011 and finished in 2014. Right now, I don't feel much of an accomplishment especially after I've been reading Warren Edward Buffett's investing (read here). I only learned to invest in stocks reading online and choosing the right index fund or UITFs to do so. I wrote a thesis on selling organic rice. What I found out was that my thesis days were a lot more fun than what I had in high school. In high school, it was almost non-stop argument with adults who keep bragging about the typewriter and using a very broken-down, Windows 95 PC. Yeah, stubborn boomers who still brag about how "great" they are.
If I were using a typewriter to write that thesis--I'd probably have prematurely aged. Maybe, I'd age a lot faster. The papers require footnotes, citations, etc. I could imagine writing through many pages, having to stay up late for too long and never achieving anything. That's why I just feel the typewriter isn't all that useful these days. People can come up with reasons to have it back. In my case, no thanks!
