I changed your ribbon tonight. Now you type dark and clear, and with less effort on my part. This is how it should be: my fingers flying across your keys, your letters flying across my page.
It was no small undertaking to fit you with a new, fresh ribbon. Turns out, you see, the cartridges I had didn't quite fit your carriage. The spools were too big for you, though the ribbon was the right width. What to do? I bought these replacement units over a decade ago, and I have three sets of them. I could go on with the old ribbon, but that won't last forever. You need to be changed sooner or later.
This takes us to the part I love most: the old-fashioned me figuring out the old-school you. The ribbon is attached to the spools like fabric to a protruding nail. Quite ruffian, to be honest. So I stripped the old ribbon from your perfectly-sized spools, stripped the new ribbon from the new spools, and wound the new ribbon around the old spools. Voila! Now the retired ribbon sits with the too-large spools at the bottom of the trash heap, while you and I churn and hum along like we had never been interrupted.
Had you been a computer, had you been a machine made too sophisticated by folk who had never known the small pleasures of pressing the keys of a mechanical wonder, our separation would have been extended. I would have had to hand you over to a stranger to toy with you, to handle and "fix" when all along, there was nothing wrong with you, nothing to fix. What if the "expert" had been a brute and resorted to forcing those big spools into you? Perish the thought. Not to my baby.
But you are the way you are -- plain, functional, sensible -- so much so that even a dolt like me can figure you out. So I had the pleasure of tinkering with ink-smudged fingers and rejoicing in your simplicity. Now I know you a little better than before, delight in you in a new way. You are perfect. And with you, I feel just right.
24 April 2012
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