Lessons from boredom: What a typewriter taught me.

It was the summer of 1970 and I was back home from my boarding school in Pune.

Like all the others kids, I was thrilled to go back home for the summer holidays and had spent months visualizing and day dreaming of what I will do on the first day of my holiday. However after the first two weeks, I was bored with the sameness of my routine. I was craving something new, something different to do.

At about this time my father purchased at “Brother” typewriter for his hospital. Needless to say, getting access and learning to type became my full time occupation. Looking at my keen interest in the machine, my father enlisted me in a typewriting class, which he thought was a much better use of my time rather than lounging around the hospital the whole day and perhaps spoiling his brand new typewriter.

The classes were conducted every day during the morning hours. I was by far the youngest in my class. My classmates were mostly young men who were aspiring to be clerks in the govt. offices or young women typing away to be secretaries. Those days being a clerk was equivalent to getting an MBA degree these days. It was the shining star of your matrimonial advertisement. And being a secretary was a way to pass time until a suitable boy came along or their husbands came home.

I would sit amongst them typing away from a script till the late hours of the afternoon. While most struggled with their typing, I had managed to get a decent speed by the end of the third day. I guess this was mainly because of my proficiency in English, which enabled me to read the document and understand what I was typing. I was involved in what I was doing. I looked at myself and the work as an author would not with the mentality of a typist.  I was a mason not just laying a brick, but a mason who was building a building.

But then there is only that much typing a kid can do for days on end and soon enough I was bored out of this too. Having paid the fees in full I was however stuck here for the rest of the program duration. While the tutor lectured us from the front of the class and gave us plenty of typing work for practice I could not understand why all these people would ever want to be a clerk or a secretary. It seemed to me like such a boring job to me.

On one of those numerous long afternoon, after I had finished typing a particularly large document I looked upon my effort and something struck me. The neatly typed and bound document looked much better than in its original state. It suddenly dawned on me that the world does judge a cover by its book at least for the first time. Henceforth onwards, I made sure I perfected this art of presentation.

Years later, when I was working for my uncle as a postgraduate in 1981, whilst perusing my Law, I used the skills I had picked up when I had to make reports for him. My uncle was a CA and always had Bank loan applications to make for his clients, and he needed someone who understood the content and accordingly made the reports error free. Those days the concept of spell check or backspace didn’t exist. A word of ink on the paper was like a patthhar ki lakeer (a line on a stone). You had to retype the entire page again even for as small syntax, grammar or spelling error.

The pages would be typed by three different typing pools in three different locations. My job was to get the reports together and check them for errors and then retype the “bad page”. Once I had finished checking everything I would then place the papers in a proper order and make a contents page. Since the papers were typed in three different locations there were no page numbers, instead there used to be a circular stamp at the bottom of the page.

After putting the papers in order I would then have to painstakingly write the page number inside the circular stamp of each page and then send them forward for binding and wait with dread for my uncle to pass it. I used to hate it when I had to make copies of each report, since photocopying technology had not yet come in India, which meant that I then had to redo the entire exercise all over again.

Well, for those students out there who complain about writing long reports and projects, just stop cribbing and complaining!  You people have a less tedious job with Google and Microsoft word. Guys, always remember be do judge a book by its cover the first time.

I have used this lesson time and again whenever I went out to either sell my photo finishing services or my flat or the golf course!  And I’m sure there are many other areas apart from business where the art of presentation can do wonders.

Do you have any such experiences where the art of presentation has given you an edge? Do share in the comments.