On 1/14/14, 9:00 AM, Hank wrote:
On 1/13/2014 10:50 PM, Califbill wrote:
Or you be like me that worked with card sorters and pneumatic card
readers
with 110 db 3' from the heads, and you are missing certain frequency
ranges. Makes cheap players sound OK.

Nothing beats adjusting hammers on a high speed drum printer printing
lines of e's or dashes.
Maybe that's why my Creative speakers sound so good.


A few months after I was recruited by The Associated Press, I was
offered a sweet job as correspondent covering West Virginia and parts of
Ohio and Kentucky. It was a great assignment. I had "offices" in several
cities, but those offices typically were nothing more than rooms off the
city room of the local AP member newspaper. Nothing fancy.

One of those offices was at a newspaper that had expanded its building.
The AP office was set up in...a former mens' room. All the toilets and
all but one of the sinks had been removed, and the walls and floors
retiled where the fixtures had been.

The problem was the room also served as the "trunk" for nearly a dozen
AP teletype machines, and the clatter in that room was unbearable, or at
least it was for me. In those days, the correspondent, writer, editor,
whatever, would prepare his or her own copy and also edit for resending
on the state wires national or regional copy that came in over the
machines in the form of typed out copy and on punched paper tape.

Unless there was hard, breaking news which required me to head to a
particular office, I basically was a circuit rider, visiting each of my
offices several times a week. I was assigned a keypunch operator who
would meet me on my schedule to keypunch whatever I wrote and edited and
put the news on the "A" wire or the regional or state wires.

My keypunch operator was a very nice young West Virginia guy who was
pretty much deaf because of his several years of working in the former
mens' room office. The noise in there was just unbearable, and I never
actually worked in that room. I just grabbed an empty desk in the
newspaper city room and did my typewriter typing or editing there.

When I left The AP, I advised the young man to find himself a lawyer and
sue the wire service for a work atmosphere that made him deaf. I don't
think he ever did; decent jobs in West Virginia were hard to come by in
those days, and my guess is that he preferred to be deaf and working in
an otherwise safe office making decent pay than being down in a mine or
driving a coal or chemical truck.