Imagine standing in a museum, looking at a display of writing implements. A timeline of glowing cases and uplit pedestals span the room’s wall. On the left, secured in a climate-controlled case, is a clay tablet detailed in Sumerian cuneiform. In 3000 BCE, someone pressed their reed stylus into wet clay. This was writing technology 1.0. Finally, no more arguments about whether your neighbor actually did borrow those five jars of olive oil — it’s right there, baked into clay.
You continue walking, noting how each innovation solved what came before: lighter, faster, more erasable, more reproducible. Quill and ink replaced clay tablets — portable! The printing press multiplied books without scribes. Pencils didn’t need ink bottles.
You’ve made it to the Industrial Revolution, and a stout yet elegant 1868 Sholes and Glidden typewriter is perched before you. It looks like it might weigh as much as your car, but the uniform text is so much more readable than chicken scratch handwriting. But wait — next to it sits an elegant fountain pen, also from the 1880s, its gold nib catching the light. Why be anchored to a desk, why fuss with dipping into messy bottles of ink? The fountain pen was the answer for anyone on the go who wanted to write for minutes at a time without interruption.
You pass another hundred years of implements and admire an IBM Selectric typewriter from 1961, with its iconic golf ball typing element. This thing could actually keep up with your thoughts, switching fonts with a snap of the ball. The hum of its motor practically whispers “efficiency.”
A little bottle of Wite-Out sits next to the IBM. Invented in 1956 by a secretary who got tired of retyping entire pages, the thick white liquid could cover your mistakes. Later Selectrics added correctable ribbons that could lift fresh ink right off the page.
Next comes a Tandy TRS-80 word processor from 1977, and it’s the paradigm shift. That blinking green cursor on the tiny screen separated writing from paper for the first time. You could write, rewrite, rearrange entire paragraphs. And it has a delete key! You could change your ideas or fix your mistakes before anyone else saw them.
You pass the next 40 years of innovation. PowerBooks, laptops, iPads. Sure, early laptops were heavy and batteries died after three hours, but you could write on an airplane. In a coffee shop. Anywhere the muse struck.
Finally, the screen of a sleek smartphone pulses with a microphone icon. Speech-to-text was possible back in 1997, but it took nearly 20 years for the technology to work reliably. Now? You talk, it types. No hands required. Writing at the speed of thought, no tool between your brain and the words except air and algorithms. The docents’ notes mention that think-to-text is on the horizon and in development in medical research labs.
You leave the museum timeline and wander into the attached coffee shop. A tap-tap-ding from across the room draws your attention to a young woman typing on a mid-century electric typewriter. This isn’t a planted reenactment. She’s actually focused and typing words.
What’s your reaction to this dedicated typist? Does she look ridiculous, lugging that heavy machine to a coffee shop when she could just sit in the sculpture gardens and dictate words to her cell phone? Is she performing some kind of vintage aesthetic for Instagram? Does it look inconvenient — tethered to that short power cord, stuck by the wall instead of claiming a sunny table by the window?
Or does it look romantic? Like she’s found a more authentic way to write, some deeper connection to the craft that the rest of us have lost in our rush toward convenience?
In real life, the woman at the hypothetical museum is my friend, Sonya Elmore. In addition to her day job, she’s one of those natural poets and artists, some anachronistic contemporary of the Beatniks or those fringe Paris artists of the 1880s. And she really does type her poems on a baby blue 1970s Smith-Corona Coronet Super 12 electric typewriter. The typewriter is named Olivia. “She’s wonderful despite her heaviness,” says Sonya. “And her only being able to be used near a [power] outlet.”
The sheer inconvenience of typewriters makes me shudder. I never did make friends with them. I was lucky that home computers and delete buttons became mainstream during my high school typing class. There is not enough Wite-Out for all my typos.
I love speech-to-text. Between speech-to-text and my AI assistant on my hands-free cell phone, I researched these writing technologies and rode my exercise cycle for 39 minutes and 45 seconds (possibly a world fitness record). And I love that my cell phone delivers the world’s knowledge; I remember the tedium of sitting at the library’s hulking microfiche reader, scroll-whir-scrolling through film sheets, hunting down a specific article. Hail the technology gods that brought us the CTRL + F function!
But I also drive a 1977 GMC farm truck. “Abigail” was top technology in her day, a contemporary of that Tandy TRS-80 word processor. But these days, the manual window cranks struggle to roll up the glass to keep out the rain. Her oversize steering wheel drifts a bit. The gas gauge lies and the odometer forgot how to count. My little Kia Soul can safely carry more passengers than the single cab truck can. But there is no amount of new truck technology that would make me give up my Abigail.
Abigail’s patinaed quirks are inconvenient (always have a raincoat on standby). But I am utterly charmed by those inconveniences. Sonya more poetically explains that she loves her typewriter, Olivia, “because she hums and buzzes and beats. There is beauty in the sounds of her. I am drawn to those vibrations, they rattle my creative nerves loose and I produce poetry that flows flawlessly from my finger tips. I type myself into a world generated by a vintage gem that I would never trade for the convenience of a computer.”
Everything humans use exists somewhere on the timeline of technology. Technology isn’t just electronics — it’s any human application of knowledge to solve problems or extend capabilities. Solving problems and extending capabilities creates convenience. Convenience can be defined as the state of being able to proceed with something with little effort or difficulty.
But sometimes effort and difficulty bring more value than convenience. Abigail has quirks, demands, and clumsy windows. Olivia must be moored to the nearest outlet. These inconveniences — whether from an earlier technology or a new but streamlined option — create space for the inner self to emerge. Peering into that convenience gap reveals stories that touch across time and materials. These small inconveniences offer respite when we need presence, not productivity.
I dislike handwashing clothes and dishes as much as I dislike using typewriters. Let the robots and machines handle the washing chores! I have LG machines for that (plus they sing me a song when the cycle is done). But in the absence of a machine to dry my clothes, there is the sun and wind. My family summered in a 1929 cabin in the high Sierras. While everyone agreed TV wasn’t allowed, we finally installed an internet connection.
There was no room in the tiny kitchen for an automatic dishwasher, and opinions varied on whether handwashing the dishes was a pleasant time to watch the water sparkle on the lake, or if it was a tedious chore in the way of important things like making and eating s’mores. A little workroom had just enough space for a basic washing machine, but not a dryer. The clothes and sheets for half a dozen house guests made quite a pile, and the ritual was to sun-dry everything. Clothes lines paralleled the walkway, looped around slender Jeffrey pines and anchored into the side of the wooden cabin. Vintage cloth bags hung from the lines, patiently waiting to offer you a clothes pin. I asked my mom: if she’d had the option of a dryer, would she have chosen it instead?
“Would I have liked a dryer? Hmm, I don’t think so…” she reflected. “I think hanging the laundry out at the cabin was my favorite ‘chore’…a ‘Zen’ time for me…It was my quiet time in the forest…sunlight filtering through the trees…the breeze, the birds. Almost like stepping ‘out’ of time. Since we were there during the warm summer months, we certainly didn’t NEED one. Our clothesline was a QUIET solar dryer that did the trick in a few hours.”
Without a machine to warm air and extract moisture from fabric, generations of cabin residents and guests had gone through the same ritual of carrying, hanging, clipping clothes. The clothespin bags themselves were a timeline — old wooden pegs that had to be notched over the line, later models with metal springs pinching the halves together, and eventually molded plastic pins in bright colors that never quite matched the forest setting.
My mom also recalled that she sometimes felt like she was “communing” with her own mother, noting, “I think the happiest I ever saw [my mom] was when she was hanging up clothes to dry.”
This relationship, which exists across different points in time, is temporal connection. Things have stories to tell. Someone else was there before, and this item has absorbed that history. There’s a timeline full of dates and events, delights and mishaps, and now you’re a waypoint along that timeline. Who drove Abigail first? A tailgate sticker says she was in the inventory of General GMC in Phoenix, Ariz. I bought her from a young Navy officer in San Diego, and now she’s registered in Texas. Across those travels, what did she haul? Where did she go?
My vinyl album collection, mostly used albums pressed before 1990, has waypoint stickers, too, and initials and names. E.B. had the Bill Black’s Greatest Hits album, Jenny owned ‘Sleepless Nights.’ Sure, I stream hours of music on Spotify…the planet’s library of music channeled through a gadget that fits in my back pocket. But sometimes I want the charming inconvenience of getting up and flipping the album every 18 minutes. Before me, someone else got up and flipped the album from side A to side B.
A few weeks ago, as I noodled around in my studio, Martin Denny’s 1957 “Exotica” album was spinning on my turntable. In the center of the album is a little, white return address label for Mr. and Mrs. R.L. Anderson of Bakersfield, California. Josie Anderson signed the back of the jacket. Serious vinyl sellers and collectors hate (hate!) when the albums are tagged by previous owners. In those circles, these stickers and initials can decrease a record’s appeal and value. But I love these breadcrumbs. Did Mr. and Mrs. Anderson select that album together, or was it a gift? What cocktail parties did that album spin through? Almost 70 years later, it’s playing in my studio, on a Sony turntable via Bluetooth to JBL speakers.
There’s research on this, on how we create habits and routines around objects that matter. The ritual becomes more important than the object’s function. The album demands I get up, flip it, pay attention to side breaks, notice when the needle needs cleaning. It refuses to be background noise.
It’s no more or less convenient to get up and flip over an original 1957 album than a 2024 repress. I could buy a new pressing of Denny’s albums. Google says I can now get reissues in Lava, Tiki Green, and Lagoon Blue. While these recent pressings offer quality sound, they lack the material authenticity of the music’s era. Material authenticity means the object is made of what it claims to be made of, using the methods of its time. Material authenticity is the proof of that temporal connection.
Mr. and Mrs. Anderson’s 1957 album, the one now in my collection, was made when the record industry was transitioning from shellac 78s to vinyl LPs. 1957 technology still used the older “hot stamper” pressing method with steam-heated plates. The vinyl compounds were less refined than later formulations — more prone to surface noise and warping. Quality control varied plant-to-plant. The pops, the surface noise, the slight warping — that’s all material evidence of its age and its journey.
Material authenticity connects you to vanished worlds through physical evidence. It matters because materials age in specific ways. When I wash my 1977 truck, I’m touching steel that was smelted in the 1970s, probably in a mill that doesn’t exist anymore, using techniques that have evolved. The material composition of car steel has changed. Modern steel is more consistent, stronger, lighter. But 1977 steel is what it is: imperfect, heavy, specific to its moment. My truck contains material that can’t be made anymore — not because we’ve lost the knowledge, but because we’ve improved the process.
Perhaps nothing embodies technology like a home. Homes are layered technology: materials engineering, construction methods, spatial design. A vintage home seems to be the pinnacle of temporal and material authenticity. As a teen, naive about the complications of home maintenance, I thought for sure I would own a gingerbread Victorian some day.
Decades later, I thought I had my chance to snap up some undervalued beauty when we moved from Southern California to rural northeast Texas. I launched our online home search by bookmarking every wonky 120-year-old 12-room hotel in Zillow’s Plano, Texas radius. Those wavy glass windowpanes could speak to a century of Texas storms. If I had that house, I would count all the windows, and then all the window panes. Then I would tally the little bubbles in every pane, knowing that no piece of glass on Earth is like this one pane in my window in my house. Glass-making techniques in the 1800s produced irregular thickness, but modern glass is perfectly uniform. You could theoretically make new wavy glass, but it would be intentionally irregular, which is different from accidentally irregular because perfection wasn’t yet possible.
Pinot grigio in hand, I’d drift through the rooms each evening, tracing my finger across the plaster walls and along each hairline fracture. Like the rings of a tree, these tiny cracks recorded the house breathing through seasons, expanding in Texas heat, contracting in winter. The plaster is a mix of lime, sand, and actual horsehair from horses that grazed somewhere in northeast Texas in the 1880s. Maybe from that old farm over the hill?
My husband did not (and does not) share this desire. Which is ironic, because he studied 17th- and 18th-century reproduction furniture. A section of my vinyl album collection sits atop the Queen Anne period lowboy that he made. He rough-cut the scalloped apron with a bandsaw and then hand-chisled and precisely filed the elegant pierced design. His lowboy, with its curved cabriole legs, is the poster child for mid-1700s furniture. It’s what Google returns when you ask for an example of Queen Anne design.
He insisted that we were NOT buying any fixer-uppers: We were moving to north Texas to be closer to his company’s Plano office. He would be commuting and managing, not learning which recipe for lime plaster bonds with horsehair.
We ended up buying a new barndominium, the durable, metal barn-style homes popularized by Chip and Joanna Gaines. When we bought it, our barndo looked more like an auto repair shop. The Mueller Building Company says the house color is “light stone,” but I know it’s “file cabinet beige.” The home is energy efficient, the metal roof fends off hail storms, and the engineered ceramic tile floors withstand our pack of dogs. After money, time, sweat equity, and all the rusted treasures a girl can haul home in her 1977 pickup truck, the barndominium has developed a sense of home. It’s new, durable, and asks nothing of us.
Deprived as I am of my vintage home, I live vicariously through other people’s houses. I live in a small rural town dotted with homes that were built in the late 1800s. I can envision myself relaxing on those wraparound porches, tracing the curled banisters, and draping holiday garland over a mantlepiece that was carved before there was sliced bread (literally: the automatic bread-slicing machine was introduced around 1928).
One particular home caught my eye several years ago and I followed its progress from near collapse to renovation to habitation. The dingy white wooden structure blossomed into a proud red vintage home with crisp black window frames. Oh, how I wanted to go inside and ogle the home’s vintage features.
But without an invitation, and unwilling to march up the walkway and introduce myself, the house and I remained unacquainted, until I met the owner, Mallory, at a regional business networking event. Randomly seated across from each other, we chatted and exchanged business cards. Coincidence! We live in the same city! We moved to the tiny town around the same time. Oh! Mallory lives in the big red house — THAT big red house. Eureka! This was an opportunity to test my theory. Are the inconveniences of an old home truly charming?
A few weeks later, my husband and I walked up to the big, red house and encountered the gate. Per Mallory, the iron gate is remarkably inconvenient, but she’d never want to “fix” it.
“It’s heavy, it’s annoying, and frankly it and the fence itself has seen better days. My husband wants to take it all down, but my understanding is that it was original to the house (or put up around the time the house was built), and I think it’s cool. It makes bringing in mail or packages inconvenient but it’s not something you see anymore.”
I loved this charming friction of the gate. Heavy, impractical, utterly irreplaceable. Something you have to greet every day, no matter how tired your arms felt. I asked my husband what he thought. Would he care if the fence and gate were removed? What if they were replaced with an aesthetically correct aluminum replica? Jeff values function more than I do. Function and form, in balance. Jeff thinks the current fence should be repaired and properly balanced so it opens easily and properly. If that’s not possible, then replace it. (Gasp! Take it back!)
I scanned the house’s profile and many fireplaces. “We have four fireplaces in the house…but they aren’t functional anymore,” Mallory admitted. “We hope to change that someday, but for now cleaning up the dirt that gets in from the chimneys all the time can get frustrating, but it feels more charming to me. The fireplaces have such beautiful woodwork and the original tiles and mirrors and it’s one of my favorite features of our house.”
Bingo! Nonfunctional fireplaces that drop dirt but look beautiful. That’s a balanced trade-off.
When she mentioned lack of space and convenient flow for people, I thought back to my truck, Abigail, and her tiny cab. How can something this big have so little usable space?
“We had to get creative to figure out which room to use as the living room and how we could make it work with a sectional. Our kids have their friends over all the time and we wanted to make sure they had a comfortable spot where they could all hang out.”
Mallory is an HR professional, in tune with personalities and capabilities. So I asked her: is there a certain type of person drawn to old homes?
“I think people that appreciate good stories and some personality are drawn to older homes for their character and charm. It’s not a cookie cutter look and it requires DIY work to maintain, so it’s not for everyone. It’s a lot to take on and anyone that loves keeping up with trends or likes a minimalist aesthetic probably isn’t interested in a home like this.”
And then there’s the issue of storage. “There is a significant lack of storage space and very few closets,” said Mallory. “You don’t realize how much you need to store in closets until you don’t have them!”
That lack of closets wasn’t an oversight. Large closets along exterior walls created dead air space that was difficult to heat in the late 1800s. Built-in storage was expensive. It was more economical to use freestanding wardrobes and chests that could be moved and repaired.
But the real difference was simpler: people owned less. A typical middle-class person might have a few outfits plus Sunday best. Mallory’s house reflects that mindset, one where you didn’t expect the architecture itself to hide away your belongings. And living in it has changed how she thinks about possessions.
“It does make you more thoughtful about what you really need or want because you have to find a spot for everything. It’s been inconvenient for sure, but I love how it’s made us more intentional with our purchases.”
There’s that charming friction…that gap between convenience and inconvenience that reveals the human story.
The charm of inconvenience isn’t really about nostalgia. It’s about the kind of attention we want to give and receive. I recently noticed a honey toned, wooden pen on my husband’s desk. A gift from a friend, the pen had been hibernating in a closet for a few seasons. But there it was, surrounded by a litter of colored cartridges, lounging atop a nest of cursive handwriting books. Not vintage Ebay wins, but new manuals printed for a resurgence of interest in cursive handwriting. “My penmanship isn’t great,” Jeff admitted, “and this is a fun way to improve it. I like the tactile nature of the writing experience.”
I looked around for his stash of pencils, but, no, he’s using the fountain pen to practice cursive. And to take notes at work! He deliberately chose fountain pen technology when he could use a well-made ballpoint, or more realistically, just type everything into Google Notes. Like I do. But he defended the practical side of it.
Being present with the physical act of writing requires specific pressure, angle, rhythm. This simple technology is reclaiming his attention and time. It’s the opposite of the dopamine-optimized social media scroll.
“I like that it makes me slow down, not just the writing experience, but also when refilling the pen from an ink well. I’m trying to distance myself from some of the digital nonsense, and handwriting notes with a fountain pen seems like a good approach.”
This isn’t about preserving the past. The old vinyl album on the new Sony turntable, the vintage cabin with Internet, the modern fountain pen — they all demand engagement. They require you to know them. They break the frictionless transaction and insist on relationship instead.
I kicked off the New Year with a post about letting go of stuff to make more mental and physical room in my studio for writing and my consulting business. Meanwhile, in real life, last week in fact, a friend who was moving out of state gave me her 1975 Smith-Corona Coronet 12 typewriter. Perhaps the universe read my post too literally. If I sit up tall at my desk and peer over the top of my monitor, assessing like a skeptical neighbor peering over a tall fence, I can see the brown typewriter on my studio workbench. I set a sheet of paper behind the black rubber roller. With a few twists, the sheet neatly tracked under the paper bail and obediently awaited some words.
The machine is scribed with ancient vocabulary — set, clear, lock. M-R? I finally found ON on the underside of the OFF dial. The typewriter came alive with a productive hum — cheerful, efficient, like a well-rested coworker reporting for duty on a busy Monday morning.
I tapped in Hello. Bang bang bang. Letters hurled onto the page. I tentatively pressed the Power Return button. The carriage slammed back like Abigail’s turbo 400 transmission shifting into reverse. POWER return is right — no silent, digital glide to the next line.
I couldn’t think of anything else relevant to say. Why waste the ribbon ink? Every word was permanent, embedded in the paper forever. I returned to my desk, then peered over my monitor again. A draft of air crossing the studio brushed the paper. The page flagged gently against the bail. A little wave, as though the typewriter was offering “Hello! Hello new friend.”
So what’s my reaction to Sonya typing in that coffee shop? A little of both. That looks like so much work. Committing words to paper without any cushion for error or whim. But I appreciate their reciprocal energy.
What’s your charming inconvenience? Is it a cherished box of recipes, penciled on 3×5 cards decades ago? More efficient versions of those recipes are available online, but embrace the convenience gap. Choose relationship over transaction, presence over productivity.
And just in case, do you have some Wite-Out I can use?
Mallory Herrin is the CEO and principal HR consultant of HerrinHR, a full-service HR outsourcing company providing payroll, employee benefits, recruiting, training and HR consulting services to small and midsized businesses.
Gayle Joliet (“Mom”) is a retired school teacher and avid Laguna Beach artist. She co-authored the children’s book “Alani and the Giant Kelp Elf” with her husband, Tom Joliet.
Sonya Elmore is an artist and competitve slam poet basic in the DFW area. Her art is regularly featured at the Creative Arts Center, in Bonham, Texas.
Michelle Haynes provides on-demand content support for B2B companies through Michelle Haynes Content Solutions, turning scattered notes and drafts into structured, usable content. She offers editing, collaborative writing, and ghostwriting for professionals who would rather listen to vintage albums than write articles.
michellehaynes.com