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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated

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To: LindyBill who wrote (69748)	9/13/2004 4:37:31 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) of 793927

I spent 3 years as a clerk typist filling out forms. The Shape of Days Filling out forms By Jeff Harrell A reader just sent me an e-mail that, I swear to God, made me smack my forehead and say "D'oh!" Then it dawned on me (and it only took me 4 days to remember) that I was in the Army from 1966 to 1970 and had a ton of documents in my 201 file. So I examined them among which was a weapons control card, about the size of a library card. It was filled out on a typewriter and therefore had been designed and printed for just such use. If I'm not mistaken, the reason Apple included a couple of monospaced fonts back in 1984 with the original Mac was so they could be used to fill in existing forms designed to be filled in on a typewriter. (Apple's ImageWriter was for all intent, a dot matrix typewriter.) Filling out forms was the principle use for typewriters in the service. My 201 file if full of typewriter filled out forms and very few actual letters. Do proportional space typewriters do a good job filling out forms? I don't know but I doubt it. Another interesting point. I typed in the letterhead and other centered text from my award of the Army Commendation Medal. In Word 2004, the text is perfectly centered of course but it is not on the actual citation. And this is on printed letterhead paper. Even the preprinted letterhead is off slightly, let alone the text the clerk added. I read that and had a genuine, no-foolin' "duh" moment. Of course a military base wouldn't have had fancy-schmancy proportional-spacing typewriters because they used their typewriters principally for filling in forms! Is this a smoking gun? Of course not. I'm convinced we're not in the kind of situation where a smoking gun will ever be found. But this is just yet another bullet point in the long list of "Hey, that's funny" items surrounding the whole Rathergate business.

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