{"id":45,"date":"2010-02-09T12:37:41","date_gmt":"2010-02-09T16:37:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/writing\/2010\/02\/09\/greetings-from-the-old-man-store\/"},"modified":"2010-02-09T12:38:05","modified_gmt":"2010-02-09T16:38:05","slug":"greetings-from-the-old-man-store","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/2010\/02\/09\/greetings-from-the-old-man-store\/","title":{"rendered":"Greetings From &#8220;The Old Man Store&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2010\/02\/vintoffforweb.jpg\" title=\"Old Time Office Supplies\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2010\/02\/vintoffforweb.jpg\" alt=\"Old Time Office Supplies\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Today I placed an order with Staples for some supplies badly needed at the Center:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0&#8220;Reinforcement, hole&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Pressboard Report Cover, side tab&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My reader may well wonder, &#8220;why badly needed?&#8221;\u00a0 No one died because pages fell out of a three-ring binder.<\/p>\n<p>We forget at times how much the work of writing still depends on paper. As much as I&#8217;ve tried, mightily in fact, to be rid of paper in my office, I find that about once per year, I will need an ancient text I photocopied in grad school in the late 1980s, an article I saved and hole-punched from a moldy issue of <em>The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> in the mid 90s, or\u00a0 a news item printed from the <em>New York Times<\/em>&#8216; Web site in 2005.<\/p>\n<p>These sorts of materials are not alien to my students, but I suspect that keeping and organizing them are as alien as, say, using a slide rule would be to their peers in the sciences.\u00a0 And yet a Writing Center could\u00a0 not exist without its crumbling archives of printed matter.<\/p>\n<p>One day in the not-too-distant future, such paper-based storage supplies will be as hard to locate as typewriter ribbons (Google <em>that<\/em>, you young rascals! We can still order them!). When that dolorous day arrives, I&#8217;ll do one of two things.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Option One: <\/strong>horde the remaining stocks of Dymo labels from the 1970s, hole-punch machines, and White-Out for personal use.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Option Two:<\/strong> Open &#8220;The Old Man Store,&#8221; with lines of clothing (suspenders, by gum!) and food (Where in the Sam Hill can I get me any Ovaltine?).<\/p>\n<p>For a long while, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.vermontcountrystore.com\/Shop\">The Vermont Country Store<\/a> served this purpose, even including jabs at &#8220;the young word-processing crowd&#8221; in their praise for a manual typewriter (no longer available, it seems).<\/p>\n<p>As if my students get sweaty palms thinking about opening MS Word.<\/p>\n<p>I just wonder if, in a few\u00a0 years, their younger siblings will be saying things like &#8220;OMG you still have an external computer!&#8221; as they chat on their brain-implants.<\/p>\n<p>What that will mean for writing remains unseen, but I worry about the longevity of the technologies for paper storage. These everyday items have so long been a part of a writer&#8217;s fortifications against forgetfulness and stupidity.<a href=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2010\/02\/dymo3.jpg\" title=\"1970s Dymo Label Maker\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2010\/02\/dymo3.jpg\" title=\"1970s Dymo Label Maker\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/105\/2010\/02\/dymo3.jpg\" alt=\"1970s Dymo Label Maker\" height=\"208\" width=\"388\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Today I placed an order with Staples for some supplies badly needed at the Center: \u00a0&#8220;Reinforcement, hole&#8221; &#8220;Pressboard Report Cover, side tab&#8221; My reader may well wonder, &#8220;why badly needed?&#8221;\u00a0 No one died because pages fell out of a three-ring binder. We forget at times how much the work of writing still depends on paper. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/2010\/02\/09\/greetings-from-the-old-man-store\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Greetings From &#8220;The Old Man Store&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6904,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1027],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technoculture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6904"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=45"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=45"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=45"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/create.richmond.edu\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=45"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}