Some old things you keep, some you toss but as long as it’s because you want to, it’s OK

COLUMN — I was sitting between NL’s Angelo Iacobucci and Andrea Klassen of KTW at a public hearing the other night when I realized what a dinosaur I am.

More accurately, I realized it all over again.

Angelo was busy whacking away at his MacBook Pro filing copy as he went, clicking around from one hi-tech editing program to another and doing whatever else radio guys do — I’ve never really understood it.

On my right, Andrea was also busy with her laptop, no doubt using it to take notes and maybe crafting a story on the hearing as she went.

Me, I sat there with my skinny reporter’s notebook, doing it old school. I never did learn real shorthand — teaching shorthand in J-school came with the generation that followed — but I taught myself a system of abbreviation that works pretty well.

F I was 2 us it hr, . sntnc wd lk lk ths.

If you can’t read that, don’t worry about it— sometimes I can’t read my own writing five minutes after I put it to paper but I get by.

This is not the part where I whine about not being able to handle new technology. I can handle new technology when I want to. I had no trouble with the typewriter.

I had coffee yesterday with Tim Shoults, publisher of The Kamloops Daily News when it was among the living. Now he has a title about a yard long and works as hard as he ever did handling regional papers and other stuff for Glacier Media.

He asked if I wanted my typewriter back. I don’t know how many times various people connected with the paper have asked me if I want it back.

When I retired, I left a couple of things in my old office. One was a really ugly painting somebody gave me, and another was that old typewriter.

It used to work but now it is a good-for-nothing piece of junk. Check that — it might make a good boat anchor but it would take two people to carry it out of the building.

By the time I left, it had long outlived its usefulness and I felt no guilt abandoning the thing. Obviously, nobody else wants it either, so I don’t know what Tim’s going to do about it because I’m not taking it.

He also asked me awhile back if I wanted to buy my old desk. I declined, even though it’s something of a museum piece by now.

So I don’t automatically like something just because it’s old, or do things the old way just because I simply can’t keep up with changes.

If I like an old thing I keep it. If I like an old way, I keep that, too.

And if I want to sit in council chambers taking notes on an old-style reporter’s notebook, I’m going to do it. Angelo gets that — he wants a notebook just like it and I’m going to see if I have any left in the boxes of old stuff I had to pack up before I left.

I think Angelo just didn’t know about notebooks and pencils.

AROUND THE TOWN — Really enjoyed the talk by Dr. Jason Shogren on the economics of climate change, though I didn’t understand most of it but it reminded me why I dropped out of economics and went into journalism. You have to be smart to be an economist, and to be an economics student.… It was great reconnecting with editorial cartoonist Adrian Raeside this week, whose work ran in the KDN for many years, and starts appearing in The Armchair Mayor News today. He said hi from Dave Obee, another KDN alumnus from years ago…. Ran into Donna Bishop and had a nice chat. She was married to my very good friend Neil Morrison, who was a sociology prof at TRU. We lost Neil back in 1999 but it seems like yesterday.

armchairmayor@gmail.com