Lesley wrote: <I still use my shorthand - Pitman 2000, especially for taking telephone messages.
This discussion has reminded me about a temp job I did as secretary to a bank manager. He used to reel off his letters really fast and I could barely keep up. Once I couldn't read a shorthand outline and had to ask him what the word was. He pulled a piece of paper out of the bin and there was the letter he'd dictated - written in longhand. The reason he dictated so fast was because he was reading!! Goodness knows why he didn't just give me the handwritten letter to copy type I don't know. Must have been something to do with the status symbol of having a secretary to take dictation. So glad the job only lasted a week.> I also did Pitman at High School and college. I remember reading short stories written in shorthand for practice. I wonder if they are still available, or like the skills have got left behind. I still use it when taking notes and I sometimes think in shorthand shapes. Was Pitman taught in the US? I thought it was all Gregg over here. I had a telex machine in my office once I was promoted out of the typing pool in my first job. I remember that for that interview a secretary read a piece from the Guardian newspaper about a man running up Helvelyn <sp> in the Lake District. I totally lost it when she said that name and spent a long time trying to transcribe it. Wish she had left the newspaper behind. :-) I did get the job though and they paid for me to go to college on a secretarial course even though I already had high speeds at typing and shorthand. My typing class was full of young policemen who had to learn how to do shorthand and typing. We used to type in time to music on a record player and had covered keys on the typewriter. Janice Janice Blair Crystal Lake, 50 miles northwest of Chicago, Illinois, USA www.jblace.com http://www.lacemakersofillinois.org To unsubscribe send email to majord...@arachne.com containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat y...@address.here. For help, write to arachnemodera...@yahoo.com.
