1004 Influential Ways to Use a Printing Machine
Absolutely not about that.

At the beginning of the 1990s, the steepest Russian offices began to throw out the first thousands of the many-million-done extinction tribe. One of them was accidentally picked up by my friend in the very center of Vladivostok. It was a real miracle – a super-elite machine from Remington, old for that time.
Working on such a machine was a physical pleasure.
The friend was in the most excellent position of spirit – he recently had a firstborn son, and the son was well. A friend was sorry for the unnecessary machine, and he took it with him. But he was a busy man and had been working on the computer for a long time. He never thought about what to do with her, and to throw her out again his hand did not rise.
The car was sent to the warehouse and there completely forgotten.

But a few months later his son began to cut his teeth.
The baby was sleeping day and night, there were no high-quality analgesic gels in those wild times in our city. The parents tried everything to ease his suffering, but suddenly the writing machine won – when the father’s wide face leaned over the cradle and smiled, a soft, rain-like tapping of keys and a melodic ringing of the car began.
These sounds were as musical as if the machine was set up by Chopin and Mozart.
The baby calmed down and smiled in response.

But soon the machine and this found a replacement - the affairs of the friend went to the mountain, and he already realized his childhood dream - bought the music center Grundik, unwittingly advertised at the time still Vysotsky. In addition to other joys, this center could play classics all night long, soothing the child much better.
In three years, they will sell this center cheaply, because it will be morally outdated – there was no CD in it. But then, in the 92nd, this center reigned in the apartment. Against such a competitor, the poor machine had no chance. Her first unexpected application ended here.

She went again to dust into the warehouse until her friend’s son found her there, being almost three years old. The car weighed two-thirds of his own weight, so he didn’t even try to pull it out.
He took it right in the warehouse. I don’t know if he looked at the TV or guessed, but he himself inserted a clean sheet of paper into the machine, scrolled it and pressed the key.
Holding his breath, he watched the silver letters take off like rockets and leave on the clean sheet tiny prints of the same letters he saw on the keys. But he fell in love with her, I think, again at the moment when the first quiet ringing of the end of the line was heard – because it was impossible not to fall in love with that ringing.

From this day began the new star hour of the machine - in response to the son's request, the father pulled it out of the warehouse, carried it to the most honorable place and gave the son in full disposal with the only condition - not to break. The car was the first serious adult thing in this boy’s life. Since it was impossible to break it, he had to come up with a thousand different games for it. I remember probably only one of them, because I myself played it with him, and with pleasure - a lot of small dances are drawn on a sheet of paper, the carriage rises so that it can not be precisely targeted with its help, after which the target is brought to the eye with a scroll and gaps.
We shot these tanks in turn with the letter "x", although there are obviously options.

He learned to use the machine for his direct purpose at the age of four, not because he was a wanderer - he had no other choice. His father was bullied and taken to a place where the e-mail could not reach.
Of course, it was possible to print letters and from the computer, but the father's computer of the child was not allowed - the monitors of that distant era beat the eyes relentlessly. And by hand he could not write at all, and so, in my opinion, he has not yet learned.
But the whole keyboard of the scrapbook he knew for a long time from his games.
The car was his friend, and he wrote letters to his father with her.

A year and a half later, my friends were justified. He returned, broke his business, and soon for his son began a new good life, in which the machine again found no place - it was replaced by a series of fashionable laptops, special schools and long trips with the family to various Fiji-Maldives.

But one day the machine started a new life again, only sad.
At the very flight of the 90s, my friend, expressed in the language of that time, collapsed. Most likely, by mistake – their particular high-altitude house of the color of dry blood was full of living targets. For his family came tough times - began a chain of relocations by rental apartments.
In each of them, a friend's son carried a heavy machine himself - probably afraid that others would just throw it out. Each new apartment was more modest and narrower than the previous one, and the machine there was more and more difficult to find a place. She became a former favorite toy - and I don't want to play, and it's a pity to throw away.

Even the young beauty widow of a friend did not rush to get married, but one day she did. And then everyone forgot about the machine for many years - it irrevocably drowned somewhere on the roof of a large country house of a new husband. If there were a man in the place of this unfortunate machine, he would have committed suicide long ago simply because of the consciousness of his own unnecessity.

The love of children is the strongest. Last summer, my friend’s grown-up son found a useful application for his machine.
He realized that the printed sheets coming out of it could easily be automatically scanned and recognized in Word text with a large package. At that time he became an active writer.
He loved to print on a machine in a pavilion in the country, in the fresh air among the strawberries of raspberries. No problems with the batteries, no unpleasant winding of the laptop fan. The guy stopped being afraid of the rays of the sun falling on the screen – now he is happy when the sun spots flash on the paper. And the laptop lies next to it in sleeping mode for episodic references.

But the most important thing - under the ringing of the car and the helmet of the keys, the real children's inspiration finally returned to him. What was his reason, he once tried to explain to me. According to him, the machine from childhood instilled in him respect for the printed word and a feeling of its irreparability.
Before printing another phrase on the machine, he scrolls it in his head several times until it becomes clear - better not to say it. This is the horror of the former motorists.
He doesn’t run at all. Thinking about the phrase, he prints it with a madman.
Fast, loud, almost blind – all the prints will then be emphasized by Word.
He does not care about the sequence of what is said - he prints in every moment the passage that worries him most. Replacing and sorting later is also easier in Word. Upon returning home, the printed texts are scanned, edited on the comp and spread far beyond our city – on current and potential customers, on websites and letters to a beloved girl.

Here is only the problem with the components - there are no more factories in Russia that produce paint tape for scissors. But it’s not a problem – the tape he orders through eBay from rather distant corners of the planet.
The car now lives a full life. She has never been morally outdated in all these years – she just had to wait a very long time for the praised information technology to finally become as perfect as herself.

With this vivid optimistic note, I was about to finish my story. In fact, I thought to put it in just three previous paragraphs – such a short positive story from the cycle of “useful advice.” Type, every old unnecessary thing or person can find its application years later. Well, how nice to print on the machine in the country when there is a scanner. But for such a five-minute story, I was too lazy or too busy. I told this story only because I recently discovered that this amazing guy managed to find another unexpected application for his favorite machine.

From time to time, quite rarely, we gather with a friendly company at his home. When our long conversation goes into memory, it happens that it is about his father. At such moments, his face sometimes becomes stone, and after a few minutes he unnoticedly leaves his room, from where begins to be communicated by a rapid tapping of keys and the ringing of the machine.
What do you do, inspiration or business – we think and continue the conversation already frankly, not afraid to strike the gentle feelings of the guy. But one day, passing by his door, I realized that the 1003th in-house account of this story, the unusual way to use the machine is to set up an intelligent noise curtain. My friend’s son, despite his early success, is still a boy, he is only 18 years old.
Through the frequent bubble noise of the keys and the usual ringing of the car, I suddenly heard him crying.

I don’t think that in such moments he is printing some sort of abracadabra – in the noise of the keys, meaningful secondary pauses are heard. For some reason, it seems to me that he, like a four-year-old then, continues to sometimes print letters to his father on the machine – emails don’t get there either.