Carbon Copy This!!
An anachronism came to me.
There are many words and phrases that we still use today, that are anachronisms in the modern world. For instance, even when we are shooting a digital video camera, that captures files to a card, we still express the video that we’ve captures as, “Footage”, as though we were still shooting film.
As an aside, I used to know how many minutes you would get when shooting a 150 foot roll of film, at 24fps, but that information has disappeared, gone to wherever anachronistic information goes.
The other day, an unexpected anachronism crossed my table…
We still use the phrase, “Carbon Copy”, typically when writing an email. We even have an acronym, “BCC”, for Blind Carbon Copy, but how many email writers, under 30 years old, have ever actually seen a sheet of Carbon Paper?
I saw these packets of carbon paper, and I looked around for my old school teachers (with mimeographed tests in their hands). How many people remember the smell of warm mimeographed paper?
How many email users, under 30 years old, would even know how to type a letter and copy it with carbon paper?
While a few of the sheets had been used, most had not. I am giving serious consideration to buying these two packs, simply for the adventure of writing a letter, and copying it with carbon paper.
I live a quiet life, can you tell?
Next, I will want to have a phone line run to my house, so that I can buy an old phone, and slam down the receiver!
Kids these day will never know that satisfaction.
I remember the credit card machines we had in shops before chip-and-pin that used triplicate carbon slips and rollers. One copy for the customer, one for the shop and the third to go to the bank for processing. I had to use those so much for my Saturday job in my teens; I can still hear the sound they made so clearly in my head ... ka-dunk ka-dunk.
I found a YouTube video a while back demonstrating the machines and showed it to my girls. I've often showed them how things were before the tech boom of the last couple of decades, which they find both weird and fascinating 😅
My dad kept a carbon copy of every letter he wrote to my mom from Vietnam (usually one letter per day). The originals she received were lost, but we were thankful that we had his stacks of carbon copies! I used carbon paper in the early 80s to keep copies of college admission applications, which was the only time I actually used carbon paper.