Student Assistants, and a July 26, 1987 note

The student assistants worked in a fairly industrial-looking room with a handful of old command-line computers and a huge printer. The printer we had been using required paper with strips on either side with holes punched in it to guide the feed. After a page was printed, you tore the strips off using perforated edges. It had one font, and printed a bit lightly, but otherwise served us well.

One day, a new Macintosh was delivered alone with a fancy printer with a daisy wheel that could print pages on plain paper and in a limited variety of fonts. I took little notice of it as I was more interested in efficiency with my tasks than novelty, but the other assistants including a slim young woman with medium-length dark brown hair gathered around it in intrigue. The dark-haired woman in particular seemed to fall in love with the new set-up and spent hours working with it much to the consternation of  the other assistants who wanted a crack at it, too.

A few weeks after the new printer arrived, I was told that it was broken and that the young woman who had formed the strongest relationship with the psychology department's new technology was responsible. I thought she had just used it to the exclusion of all of the older, sturdier equipment, but it turned out that she was using it to produce personal correspondence.

The oldest assistant among us, a chain-smoking guy with floppy light-brown hair who tended to pace nervously around whatever space he was in, told me that she was making form letters to send to her friends back home. She would ask a question and provide what she thought were funny, interesting, or quirky multiple choice answers for them to check off and return to her. After the umpteenth letter, the daisy wheel on the printer pooped out and she was barred from touching the new technology. While everyone was angry with her for breaking the new gadget, I felt sorry for her that the only way she could get her friends to write back to her was to give them a form letter.

I was far too verbose to use this sort of letter-writing, but my mother bought me a tablet full of the same check-box style correspondence. If you look at the note I'm showing today, you can see a line across the top where it was torn off the page. This was the first and last piece of written correspondence of this type that I sent to Tito. Most of what I did was covering nearly every square inch of space I had with words.