WAAGNFNP & Uncategorized Posted by peter ramus, 23 Mar 2007 06:08 am

A Brief Word From the Bureau of Lost Or Stolen Appellations

When the Da died, we knew the jig was up. That’s when I took the job here at the Bureau. No more the free and easy life living off his largesse like before, no. Popcorn and pie and another round for your man down at the end of the bar? No, no more of that ever more. All of us needed to go out and depend on our own selves now instead of him, and for myself, well, truth of the matter is, I took the first position offered me. Something to do.

I found myself here in the back offices, working for the Deputy Effectuator and all. This is years ago now, back before the bewildering decades of mergers and acquisitions, spinoffs and layoffs that have continued down to the present day;— simpler times, when the Bureau was part of some other concern entirely, some sort of publishing house, or maybe it was financial services.

Suddenly it became common to come to work and find all the previous letterhead gone, removed overnight and a new and unfamiliar outfit seemingly in charge, though the Bureau’s routine was barely affected. Paychecks drawn on a different bank, parking slots reassigned, that sort of thing. For awhile there I remember a fashion for names starting with X, or Z, or some other unlikely letter, and we had a pool, an office pool, you see, where you could wager a small sum on the date a new consonant would rule us.

The Good Old IBM 026

I operated a keypunch machine back then, a grand old Hammond B3-sized thing the IBM 26 was, gunmetal gray with each and every keystroke giving off its precise, authoritative clunk as the tiny die cut its perfect, miniscule rectangle of a hole in the given row of the given column of the stiff paper stock of the justly famed IBM card. 80 columns, you see, the card automatically advancing as the keys were stroked, each column’s hole representing a letter, say, or a number, depending on which row the hole appeared in.

Up above the space where the card was being worked, where its successive holes were being methodically punched, was a small open compartment, and in it a little drum, cleverly engineered to hold its own IBM card, clipped snug to the drum, you see, the drum turning in concert with the advance of the card below, giving a signal as it did to the machine as each column of the card being punched presented itself, telling the machine exactly how to treat that column.

Say, for example, column 35 was inevitably due to be punched with the code for White, Male, as was the case in those unenlightened times. The card on the drum, you see, could be set to signal the machine that this was the case, and the machine would automatically punch a hole in the appropriate row in that column and move on, saving the operator a keystroke. Every column was susceptible to this treatment: programming, we called it. Clever people in the office knew how to do it, how to reduce to a bare minimum the number of actual keystrokes spent on each card, letting the machine itself intervene as needed, and though I suppose I might have learned how to program the thing myself, it never came to that.

Every day we sent off thousands of cards to be sorted and processed and printed on massive connected sheets of perforated paper somewhere, which then came back to another office in the Bureau for filing.

Those with any ambition at all eventually left the Bureau, happily promoted or just as happily taking another job someplace else. Years passed, a day came when the keypunch machines were dragged away, along with all the related office gear of that once groundbreaking generation of equipment, and staff found itself subjected to training on a whole new set of implements. I do miss the clatter of the old 26, the sight of the snakey cables connecting callers on the PBX, the sudden sharp scent of mimeographs piercing through the permanent odor of cigarette smoke shrouding our daily routine. Ah, well. Those times won’t come again, is what I’m saying.

p.r.
Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
WAAGNFNP

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Responses to “A Brief Word From the Bureau of Lost Or Stolen Appellations”

  1. on 23 Mar 2007 at 6:15 am 1. The Constructivist said …

    Bartleby lives, or, as Faulkner might have “programmed” it, the Dead Letter Office is never dead, it’s not even past.

  2. on 23 Mar 2007 at 6:59 am 2. spyder said …

    Those times won’t come again, is what I’m saying.

    But the picture alone is enough to evoke horrible painful memories of those decades so long long long ago. Time out of mind? No way Dylan! Somewhere down there, below, in the basement storage section, are a couple of archive boxes, in which i stuffed large rubber-banded bricks of those cards. Just seeing the image of the machine (and the boys of Big Blue knew how to build machines that just embodied every sense of the dehumanizing ugly bureaucratic greyness) immediate reminded me of one of my bad days in the 60’s at UCLA.

    Karma may not be instant, but it sure has a mean streak, bitter and coldly calculating too. The trick with card punchers was to make sure that when you picked up the brick out of the collating stacking rack, you quickly banded it and placed it carefully, in the proper order in the appropriate card box. Then, when you finished you could take the box to a safe place, with a very large table, and resort the bricks into larger sections of blocks to drop carefully into the reader, to make sure that you punched all those holes just exactly right.

    The best and worst of pranks was of course to stalk a happy student who had just completed a successful reading session with the cards all neatly stacked in the box in perfect order. At the propitious moment one could destroy the intellect and what was left of that person’s mind by simply bumping into them and spilling the contents of their box upon the commons. Vengeance is of course retributive and pretty much required. Mine came on a particularly windy day, but that was not the worst of it. No, that day i was on my way to hand in my BA thesis and was also carrying two other completed papers. While i was running across the quad trying to catch the blowing cards, my three papers were stolen. Literally gone like the wind. Only good memory of that, came two years later, when an undergraduate tried to turn in one of the papers to me (the TA) for a class. Oh those early days of paper mills, how easy then to track down the responsible fraternity.

    IBM be damned. Whereas mimeograph, well, what can one say? There really was nothing like huffing that solvent, using that little blue bottle of gooey fluid to stuff fiber back into the typos, and of course, listening to that oh so very special music of the ditto machine. The fluid made for great pyrotechnic fun at Burning Man, or so it seemed from my vantage point.

  3. on 23 Mar 2007 at 7:18 am 3. christian h. said …

    We still used mimeographs when I was in grade school in the late seventies, early eighties. Sniff. By secondary school, they were gone.

  4. on 23 Mar 2007 at 7:52 am 4. peter ramus said …

    One of my fond memories of those times is visiting the spacious air-conditioned sanctuary where the enormous machines that sorted and printed the results of our labors were housed, and the hushed tone of the functionary who told me that the actual computer, that big box of a thing over there, had 4 kilobytes of memory, the implication being that with so much power one might, dare it be spoken, RULE THE WORLD.

  5. on 23 Mar 2007 at 8:15 am 5. JP Stormcrow said …

    We still used mimeographs…

    Are you sure you are not thinking of ditto machines? (with the purple ink.) And “sniff” is certainly the correct sentiment. Fresh dittos competed with bus exhaust for primacy among my “hmmm… now why do I seem to be drawn to inhale these otherwise ghastly fumes?” experiences.

    And Peter, the style of this nifty piece is being a “tip-of-the-tongue” experience for me. I am probably overlooking an obvious source, but the closest I am coming is The Restraint of Beasts by Magnus Mills.

  6. on 23 Mar 2007 at 8:39 am 6. christian h. said …

    Right. Ditto machines - I didn’t know that word, in German the products are called “Abzuege”. What’s a mimeograph, then?

    Also: I love this piece. It’s the kind of writing I can get lost in… proving that nostalgia is directly wired into the brain stem, starting at age 30 or so.

  7. on 23 Mar 2007 at 9:08 am 7. peter ramus said …

    I haven’t seen Mills’ book, J.P., but anything Pynchon calls a “demented, deadpan comic wonder” sounds pretty darn attractive. Thanks for the heads up. I’ll look for it.

  8. on 23 Mar 2007 at 9:27 am 8. Foucault said …

    Dear Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator,

    I fear I may have inadvertently (cough, cough) stolen an appellation.

    It has been several months since the appellation in question came into my possession. Though we might define the initial acquisition as a bit of random kleptomania on my part, I have since acquired a sincere and deep-rooted fondness for the said appellation.

    What do you advise in a case like mine? Should I simply keep the appellation and hope that no one will notice or miss it? Should I make some effort at restitution or back payment to the owner of the appellation? (He is dead, so this would be very difficult). Should I absolve myself of the borrowed appellation by parting company with it and finding another, more original one?

    I thank you for your column, although it has brought to the surface a problem that I would prefer left buried.

    Sincerely,
    M. Foucault

  9. on 23 Mar 2007 at 10:23 am 9. James Killus said …

    Mimeographs were the publishing engines of a prehistoric phenomenon called “fanzines.” The word still exists, and has been used for many a SIG’s photocopied screeds, but the original fanziniers (to possibly, but probably not, coin a term) were primarily science fiction fans, with a few comic book knurds thrown into the mix. There was considerable overlap in those volcano inflicted times.

    Mimeographs used a “cut stencil” technique, which allowed ink through a paper-ish master, and could turn out many more copies than Ditto, which was limited by the amount of colored wax that was deposited on its own master. The advantage of Ditto was that several different waxes could be used, achieving a ghastly multi-colored product, though this was seldom done, though I suspect more from ignorance (how many even knew of non-purple Ditto?).

    Mimeo stencils could be corrected with the aptly named “Correction Fluid” which begat the fanspeak term “Corflu.”

    I myself skipped those phases and went directly to Student Union subsidized photo offset sometimes using linotype master sheets. This of course was the time when the Log-log Decitrig on your belt meant something special, though there are varying interpretations of what “special” meant in return.

    Those of us who wished to blunt the impact of a spilled card deck applied magic marker patterns to the edges. There were incidentally card sorting machines that would put everything back in order, provided one had the wit to number each card, and seldom changed the code therein.

  10. on 23 Mar 2007 at 10:31 am 10. peter ramus said …

    Dear M. Foucault,

    The Effectuator’s Office is here to help, but I’m afraid your case falls outside our given mission. However, should you wish to lose or steal an appellation in the future, please feel free to contact us. We’re always eager to be of service.

    Confessions are best left at the inbox of the Ministry of Justice, where, from what I understand, “operators” are on duty 24 hours a day, M-F (holidays excepted).

    p.r.
    Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
    Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
    WAAGNFP

  11. on 23 Mar 2007 at 10:39 am 11. spyder said …

    The easiest way to tell the difference between mimeo and ditto was that the former usually turned out black and the latter that funky shade of blue (with the smell). Mimeo’s also tended to really smear, which made them the dread of teachers. And as James Killus points out, both were pains in the ass to correct while you were typing them. It required pulling them up and out of the typewriter, then opening them up to expose the stencil layer, then packing the error with filler fluids, drying it, and finally trying to make sure they got realigned properly in the typewriter. As for IBM, i loved my Selectrics and their silver balls.

    Those of us who wished to blunt the impact of a spilled card deck applied magic marker patterns to the edges.
    A legacy of which still exists today, as do many of those old patterns, in the publication of things like standardized test booklets and answersheets, and other materials. Of course the problem with the marker line was that you had to make sure the card wasn’t reversed, thus that extra moment required to look at the little cut corner groupings.

    Log-log Decitrig
    Oh James, i totally forgot about that appelation classification. Wow. The old K&E, one of which still sits over there on the shelf behind me. Actually i still have two of them (the other is down in storage), don’t ask me why, because i have no idea either? I can hardly use it any more.

  12. on 23 Mar 2007 at 10:53 am 12. christian h. said …

    Thanks for the explanations! I seem to remember we did receive some colored (”ghastly” is exactly right) dittoes (?) in “Nature and everything else not reading/writing, math or music” class. But memory is a tricky thing.

    There are still a lot of mimeographed notes of 50’s and 60’s mathematics seminars in any reasonable mathematics library. It was the great time of “we are going to re-do this whole subject in our seminar and then write it up on 3000 pages” seminars - usually run in Paris; the result, quite often, wasn’t published but distributed as mimeographed notes. The predecessor of the preprint. I guess 3000 pages of ditto product would make anyone keel over from noxious fumes…

  13. on 23 Mar 2007 at 2:06 pm 13. Azelie said …

    When I was an undergrad in the early 90s, I was a student worker in an academic office that still had a mimeograph machine, which I think we used to reproduce anything that needed more than 30 copies — it was cheaper than using the photocopier. Around the beginning of the semester, we had to ask professors to turn in their syllabi for copying quite early, relatively speaking (not fun trying to wrangle syllabi out of harried profs, which I understand better now that I am the one in the copy room on the night before my class starts). This allowed us to space out the use of the stencil machine, which would overheat fairly easily and just stop working. Then, of course, there were the hours spent standing over the mimeograph machine inhaling fumes while watching the copies and making sure that there was enough ink in the drum. Good times.

  14. on 23 Mar 2007 at 2:15 pm 14. Dr. Free-Ride said …

    I miss dittos. I never cared much about the color, one way or another, but there was something about the *moistness* of newly run dittos that I really liked. I enjoy the warmth of a fresh stack of photocopies, but it’s not the same.

    So … did anyone else here grow up in a house with wreaths made of punch cards?

  15. on 23 Mar 2007 at 2:38 pm 15. Oaktown Girl said …

    I agree with DFR - I miss dittos too. I always liked that light purple-violet color (unless it was for a math quiz) and all the kids in my school (and I’m sure every school) were mesmerize by the smell.

    Update: Coming tonight - our first Open Thread for your Friday night and weekend ranting, raving, shout-out, and NCAA tourney/anti-NCAA tourney needs. Maybe mds can truly be the “first” this time!

    Hey, I think I was the first to use our nifty hyperlink-to-comment feature! I win!

  16. on 23 Mar 2007 at 3:11 pm 16. spyder said …

    So … did anyone else here grow up in a house with wreaths made of punch cards?

    My dad was one of NASA early propulsion system designer/engineer/managers, so we had all sorts of weird stuff made from punch cards. Table doilies, odd sculptures, miscellaneous missles and rockets–you name it, it passed through our house. Of course that was also the era of staples and large ugly paper clips, lots of cut fingers or the worst of all possible sensations: the staple point up under a fingernail.

    The advantage of knowing where to find, and how to use a ditto machine, may come into play if we start having losses in the power grid. Just saying….

  17. on 23 Mar 2007 at 3:27 pm 17. JP Stormcrow said …

    From the good folks at the International Slide Rule museum. Check it out, lots of good stuff. They are as obsessed with detail as you might imagine.

    And for an early look at Copying Machines and other early office equipment try here.

  18. on 23 Mar 2007 at 4:03 pm 18. Foucault said …

    Dear p.r.
    Secretary to the Deputy Effectuator
    Bureau of Lost or Stolen Appellations
    WAAGNFP,

    I thank you for your response, and am secretly glad that my case falls outside of your given mission. It would be a sorrow and shame to have to give back my name.

    I do not plan to lose or steal further appelations in the future. For now, I will cherish the one that I have and treat it with the dignity it deserves.

    Best wishes,
    M. Foucault

    PS: I will leave my confession about periodically sniffing heavy-duty magic markers when I was very young in the said inbox at the Ministry of Justice. I only did this once or twice, but ah, the memories…

  19. on 23 Mar 2007 at 4:15 pm 19. JP Stormcrow said …

    … about periodically sniffing heavy-duty magic markers..

    Ah yes, huffing those as well… I think at least, … gee it’s all being a little fuzzy right now. What were you saying? …. Volatile is as volatile does.

    Seriously, what I have never understood is what aspect of brain chemistry and wiring make the inhalation of these volatiles seem vaguely pleasurable?

  20. on 23 Mar 2007 at 4:31 pm 20. Foucault said …

    I don’t understand, either. Yet there was definitely something heavy, gasoline-ish, and intoxicating about the smell.

    Fortunately, those heavy-duty markers came and went the way of the mimeo and the carrier pigeon; but whatever they had inside them was certainly different than the odorless Sharpies and neon highlighters of this postmodern day and age.

  21. on 24 Mar 2007 at 8:57 am 21. spyder said …

    Seriously, what I have never understood is what aspect of brain chemistry and wiring make the inhalation of these volatiles seem vaguely pleasurable?

    That wonderful little indole ring: indole is a compound obtained from coal tar and indigo and produced by decomposition of tryptophan in the intestine, where it contributes to the peculiar odor of feces. It is excreted in the urine in the form of indican. Adding certain molecules to an indole ring opens a plethora of tryptamine and other alkaloid analogs… yippeeeeee.. oops

    No, not that, but similar as in the distillation of petroleum to break out those high-end clear hydrocarbons: toluene, benzene, xylene, etc. These do find receptors in the brain that are designed to connect with tryptamines etc., that produce temporary euphoria and deliria until the brain’s own MAO system returns. And for those of you who still need the thrill on occasion, they still make Sharpies with odor, commercial white-out w/ lovely distillates, and most of the more expensive white board dry-erase markers (the ones that really erase easily) are still quite toxic volatile. Also vis-a-vis’s seem to have that distinctive aroma wafting around the vase bent over the proverbial overhead.

    I can’t imagine how education existed so long with just chalk and blackboards.

  22. on 24 Mar 2007 at 8:54 pm 22. James Killus said …

    Ah, the giant slide rule, always the answer to the question of who had (or was) the biggest tool.

    A little googling informs me that The Google has never heard the word “fanzinier” before, so this thread has made a little bit of history, all for the greater good of waagnfnp, of course, as I myself shun fame and fortune as firmly as fortune and fame shun me.