"I'm thinking back to working at The News in Mexico City.
We were housed in an old building damaged several times by earthquakes, and the floors slanted rather dramatically. We didn't have assigned desks, just took whatever was open when we arrived.
As my shift didn't start until 4:00 p.m., I almost always got one of the desks where the slant made all the drawers slide open and the ancient typewriter creep perilously toward my lap as I banged on it as hard as I could to coax readable copy from the ink-bare ribbon.
On days when someone came in after we left at midnight to clean the office, they would wipe down the keyboards with vigor, because the little round metal letters that had at one time been firmly affixed to little metal posts would go flying in all directions. They were not typists themselves, so they had no earthly idea where the letters were supposed to go, so they just put them back any old where, rendering the keyboards a jumble of letters and numbers that decidedly did not match up with what the keys actually were.
We had only two choices -- either laboriously re-structure the typewriter before we started work, or try to ignore the wonky keyboards and type from memory. I found it oddly difficult to type properly, even though I had the correct keyboard positions memorized. It felt sort of like patting your head and rubbing your stomach at the same time."
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