MISTAKES

After staying up all night typing 30-page research papers for my college classes on a manual typewriter, this word processing stuff on a computer keyboard seems easy enough to me. . . But I thought it was pretty good back in the day, because I had Liquid Paper to paint over my mistakes and allow me to correct a few letters here and there. We always had a typewriter around my house for me to play with, because my mum was a supervising legal secretary for the head of a law firm. She also did typing at night as a side job, for various other professionals. They were mostly big shot commercial real estate agents, who would park their 12-cylinder shiny bronze sport cars out in front of our house when picking up or dropping off the documents they wanted typed. So, I even know what life was like before Liquid Paper. . . You had to carefully erase a mistakenly typed letter from the page with a gritty eraser before you could attempt to type over it. And if the paper wasn’t very thick, you could end up erasing a hole in it. Which reminds me, I know an interesting true story about some mistakes - Bette Nesmith Graham, worked as a typist at a bank, and she used to make a lot of mistakes. But she wanted to find a better way to correct them. So, she started mixing tempera paint in her kitchen blender. She was that serious about it. She called her correction fluid “Mistake Out,” and she started distributing it in small green bottles to her co-workers, back in 1951. The fluid was popular, and her Mistake Out Company continued to grow, and it kept her busy on nights and weekends. But then, she made a horrible “mistake” and failed to correct it. She accidently typed the name of her company, instead of the name of the bank she worked for, on some important papers, and she got fired for it. So, she decided to devote herself full time to her Mistake Out product, and in 1956 she founded The Mistake Out Company. As the inventor, she offered the product to IBM Corporation, but they turned her down. . . So, she continued to sell the product herself, from her house, for the next 17 years . . . Later she changed the name of her company to The Liquid Paper Corporation. Finally, in 1979 the Liquid Paper Corporation was sold to Gillette Corporation for 47.4 million dollars, with royalties. But she died the next year, in 1980, leaving the bulk of her fortune to her son, Mike Nesmith, a member of the popular rock band; The Monkees. That's right! Necessity is really the mother of invention, isn’t it? You got a problem, THINK, what can be done to fix it? Mistakes, mistakes, mistakes! I like how she made lemonade when life handed her lemons. If only we would all strive just as hard to fix our own problems - even if it means mixing paint in our kitchen blenders too. . .