Getting ahead of – and keeping up with – the times. It's never too late to learn something new.

Visit these links to see photos and videos related to this story.

https://backbayhouses.org/393-commonwealth

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFv2luACmfxR38riH8Lhl1A

Cover photo ©Dana Whittle. Background music I Ain't Dead Yet ©Dana Whittle, sound effects from the author's field recordings and freesound.org. Theme music My Radio’s Frozen ©Dana Whittle. All rights reserved. Recorded, mixed and mastered at Studio Vizou, Sainte-Béatrix, Québec.

More from the author on https://pasdaccent.com, https://vizou.com and https://medium.com/vizou.

Copyright ©2026 Dana Whittle / Vizou. All rights reserved.

Hi! I'm Dana Whittle, born in New England and transplanted to the rich cultural soil north of the border, here in rural Québec. Pas d’accent features stories that I began recording in 2018, and after a pause, brought back to life in 2026 to explore – in no particular order – the cultural intersections of art, music, technology and language from my perspective as a bilingual immigrant in love with the culturally rich community I am so lucky to be a part of. I invite you to "faites comme chez vous" – make yourself at home – and enjoy the visit! And by the way – I love your accent!

[theme music]: …find a new frequency, run between you and me, transmission fantasy…

I bought my first Macintosh computer in 1985.

It was the second model to be released, a diminutive

512K, the amount of RAM it boasted.

It was about the cutest thing I'd ever purchased, just so friendly, and I was absolutely,

unconditionally in love with it.

I had just been recruited by a successful Boston advertising agency,

hired to search for new clients and pitch them our creative talents.

My office was on the fourth floor in what had formerly been a maid's bedroom in a building that was an entire house on Commonwealth Ave.

in Boston's Back

Bay, originally built in 1899

for a widow whose daughter later married Cyrus McCormick,

inventor of the reaper. It was willed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology upon her death in 1967.

MIT

subsequently sold it to the Society of Jesus of New England.

for

use as a rectory, thereby saving it from being developed into an apartment building, which finally happened in 2005.

Like most women of my era, I'd learned to type in high school, in a course that was obligatory for girls and boys alike

Unlike the boys, however, many of us girls ended up actually using this skill as receptionists, secretaries, etc.

, as we struggled to enter the world of business, mostly run by men.

I actually enjoyed learning and remember mentally typing every word I saw on a television screen or street sign.

I held quite a few jobs where typing was a requirement.

It was still a task that only women were expected to do.

At one job, where I was a junior level manager, a man who held the same managerial level position as I

was instructed to hand his typing off to an or secretary, while our mutual boss would call me into his office regularly to dictate letters and other documents. I was to type them up and return them to him

stat.

While this pissed me off, I didn't dare to complain, and luckily for me I liked to type, an activity which gave me a dopamine

rush and reinforced my overactive pattern recognition.

My new job at the ad

agency involved lots of research, poring over massive MRI

marketing research index volumes

to see who was buying what, how often, where and why, in order to make case analogies for upcoming pitches.

I also prepared estimates of what potential clients spent on their current advertising

based on the rate cards of the print and broadcast media they appeared in.

I would sum up all of this activity in neatly typed reports for my superiors.

In addition to this, I often prepared media plans for both pitches and active clients, another task that required a properly typed-up

result.

With my new Macintosh on my desk

and a small dot

matrix printer, because I couldn't yet afford a laser writer which cost

5,000 US at the time, I spit out lovely perfectly formatted documents to put on the desk of my employer.

My boss

and day-to-day supervisor

had hired me away from my previous job after I'd interviewed his agency as a candidate for agency-of-record.

He was a tall, handsome, and charming guy with sparkling eyes and dimples, who loved to tell me stories about growing up in New York city, where his dad played clarinet in the orchestra of a major television network.

Later, his father managed to wrangle him a job in the network's mailroom, and over the years he worked his way up from there to become vice president of one of New York's biggest ad agencies

before getting a job offer in Boston that he couldn't refuse.

I loved to hear those stories.

And we both loved

swing music.

This was thanks to my parents, who put almost nothing but on our record player, teaching my sisters and me how to swing dance from an early age.

My current boyfriend and I–he didn't dance–took my boss and his wife, who didn't like to dance as much as her husband did, out to a jazz club where I'd often gone with my parents to hear a great swing band that played there every weekend.

He and I danced up a storm while our partners chatted at the table, patiently waiting for us to be too out of breath for another one… but I'm getting off track.

The first time I showed up in his office with a freshly printed report, he was actually shocked, even a bit mad.

"You

typed this up yourself?", he growled.

"Of course

I did.

I know how to type", I replied, surprised by his reaction.

He was not pleased.

"We have a secretary and a receptionist who do that.

You're a manager.

You're not supposed to type."

I

was a bit startled by this response, but if you know me, then you know I'm pretty stubborn.

And I can't help it that I'm also

practical.

"But I can type!", I repeated.

Prior to purchasing my brand new Macintosh, I'd been forced to give reports to one or the other of the two women who typed for everybody in the agency.

Each time, there were inevitably errors that needed fixing.

I would have to mark up the first draft with a pencil and return it to the typist

who

then retyped the entire document on her IBM Selectric.

I vaguely remember the agency purchasing at least one newer

model.

I think it was in IBM Wheel Rider,

a machine that had a memory-enabling recall of previously typed documents from a computer RAM cache.

But even with a memory typewriter, it was a lengthy process from the writing of the initial document

to the final corrected version, including hours of waiting in line behind whoever was more important than me–which was nearly everybody–for it to be done.

The entire agency, with the exception of the copywriters, who for creative reasons

were allowed to type for themselves, depended upon these two overworked typists to make them look good.

After being reprimanded, I kept my head down but continued to do my own typing, and as I got to know my boss better, he came to accept my unnatural ways, but would still occasionally grumble under his breath about it.

But it became clear to me after a while that he liked the fact that when he asked me to do a task that involved a written result, that document landed on his desk pretty darned fast.

Meanwhile, he himself had to write a lot of letters and other documents, which he did with a trusty pencil and paper.

The typists often had difficulty reading his handwriting, and this meant that they interrupted him to have him identify words.

"Does this say

invented or inevitable?

Or is it invariably?

I'm sorry I can't quite make it out.

Oh, incredible,

of course!", they'd apologize.

Then they'd type it up again.

And maybe even again after he thought of a new and better way to rephrase

something he'd

started with.

I learned a lot on that job.

But I left the company after a year to work at a young woman-run design firm in nearby Cambridge, at the precise moment that the tech

revolution was happening.

That's when I finally borrowed money from my mom to purchase a new LaserWriter.

I was giddy about being part of the high-tech world that included our clients with cutting-edge products, the up-and-coming

stars similar to those in the internet

startup boom just a few years later.

I remained friends with my former boss and mentor, staying in touch over the years that followed.

He eventually left the agency and went on to freelance as a media strategist and marketing consultant

A few years later, after I'd gotten married and had a bunch of kids, I visited him at his home outside Boston, along with the aforementioned family.

He was happy to see us and got out his banjo

to play us a few tunes from the 1930s and 40s, songs I knew from my own childhood, which I wouldn't have known if it wasn't for my crazy parents.

We still talked on the phone from time to time, and one day, I answered the phone in my country home office to hear a voice on the other end exclaim excitedly "You

were

right!" without even telling me who was calling.

It took me a minute to place him.

"About what?"

I asked once I'd figured out who it was.

"Typing!", he confessed with a sheepish

note in his voice.

"I finally bought myself a Macintosh computer and I'm learning how to type.

And

boy does it save a lot of time.

I can't believe I gave you such a hard time about typing your own stuff!

What a waste of time that was for me and for those poor secretaries."

Over the next few years, as computers evolved and we all got laptops and then phones

with cameras, he began making videos of himself playing ùkulele

to share online

with his grandchildren.

As for this old dog, I'm not only still a fast and accurate typist,

but a coder and web developer too, one of the relatively few folks of my era to have been tenacious enough to make the leap from specifying type

to troubleshooting web

architecture, proof that you're never too old to learn something new.

Woof!

If you made it this far, maybe you enjoyed this episode will be back. Pas d'accent is a produced by Vizou, otherwise known as Dana Whittle. The theme music was written, performed and produced by me at Studio Vizou in Sainte-Béatrix, Québec. You can find more info at vizou.com and pasdaccent.com.

[theme music]: …there's nothing coming, in but the snow and the sleet and wind, cause the window's stuck open… find a new frequency, run between you and me, transmission fantasy…