Bound To Get More Use Than A Gold Watch

Last month was truly an emotional roller coaster for me. It started out on a high note, as my manager informed me of my pay raise and performance bonus following my annual review. It ended with a hastily arranged call with my manager’s manager, letting me know that my position had been eliminated. Normally this responsibility would have fallen upon my manager, but as I learned later on, she too was laid off along with a number of my coworkers. Talk about your ups and downs.

I had already been working towards an early retirement, just not quite this early. Now I find myself among the “extra early retired”, of which there are a growing number of us thanks to the pandemic. This was definitely not to plan, but my financial advisor who I would trust with my own life (and who also happens to be my wife) informs me that we should be just fine. We might just need to make a few course corrections is all.

So what does any of this have to do with typewriters you might be asking yourself. Well, to put it bluntly, I won’t be buying any more of the things. Kidding, sort of. While I will definitely be tapering back my typewriter buying habits, I had already established that I had more of these machines than my needs called for and had even begun to give some away. But I don’t doubt that the occasional bargain might find its way into my home at some point in the future.

However, I did manage to treat myself to another machine between the news of the pay raise along with the bonus and the news that my job had been eliminated. In fact, it happened to arrive later in the day that I was informed my employer was letting me go. This is in par t why I have come to think of this as my “retirement typewriter”. In days gone by, back when people used to work for a single company over the course of their career, it wasn’t uncommon for their employer to present them with some sort of a notable gift when they finally decided to call it quits, typically a gold watch. While it wasn’t presented to me by my previous employer, I’ve ended up with a gold typewriter.

Actually it is more of a yellow cream color, almost like the color of rich butter. It also features black keys and platen knobs, which look very sharp against the cream color and the chrome trim in my opinion. This particular machine is a 1959 Olympia SMC. I found it over on the Mercari site. I happened upon ~the listing within minutes dafter it had been posted. It was being offered at a very reasonable price, with the seller noting that this. typewriter was having an issue with the carriage dragging when typing lowercase characters. This proved to be the well known issue where the bushings between the frame and the body shell had become compressed with time and were in need of replacement.

Ironically, I had spotted what was practically the twin to this machine earlier this year. It had been posted on craigslist by my favorite local typewriter repair shop. I even called about that machine and asked to place a hold on it, but there was a mix up and that example was sold to someone else. While I was bummed about the way things went down, I did my best to shrug it off. Of course I now realize that this was a blessing in disguise. Not only does this example that I ended up with still have its original case (the other had none), but it is in much nicer condition than the twin that I had found earlier and it features my favored II CPI type size. All this at a much lower price and the oNly things that it needed were the replacement bushings and a new ribbon. I might yet do a bit of fine tuning, but it works just fine as it is.

Everything for a reason as the saying goes. I never thought that I would find another one of these yellow and black SM3’s, but I should have known better as there are seemingly always more typewriters out there. I can only hope that things work out so well with my “extra early retirement”. I definitely won’t have any problem coming up with things to occupy my time, including much more writing (and therefore more typewriting). As I’m not really one for gold watches anyway, it would appear that I’m on the right path after all. Only time will tell, but I’m liking the way things are headed.

AFTERTHOUGHTS: The seller of this Olympia SM3 performed one of the best packing jobs that I’ve ever witnessed and I tip my cap to them for such attention to detail. I also picked up a couple of typewriters off of Goodwill’s auction site last month, both of which arrived undamaged, surprisingly so as the packing job in each case left a lot to be desired. That was my first experience with buying from Goodwill online and based on that experience I can’t imagine spending a lot of money on any typewriter with them. But that’s just me and some food for thought.