A. B. Dick

“Could you Xerox this for me?” I asked the young clerk at the skilled nursing facility where I was serving as medical director.

She stared at me as though I had requested a poultice, a bloodletting, or perhaps a fresh team of plow horses.

“What?”

“This,” I continued, absently waving a prior authorization form in her general direction. “Could you get it Xeroxed for me?”

“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” she replied, in a tone of voice that conveyed both consternation and sympathy in equal measure—the same tone she might have used had I been her elderly grandfather, asking her to shoo the Keebler elves out of my bedroom while fumbling around in the nightstand for a half-used tube of Fixodent.

“Copied,” I explained. “I need a copy made. You know—Xeroxed.”

With a look of dawning comprehension, she indicated she knew of Xerox, vaguely, as a brand. But in her world, copies came from the HP LaserJet in the front office. In mine, Xerox had been so ubiquitous it had morphed into a verb, a command, a technology—a pillar of late-1900s civilization.

At some point, I’d become antique office equipment. It was as if I’d used a perfectly ordinary word and discovered, to my horror, that I had accidentally brought a butter churn to a staff meeting.

With that little miscommunication cleared up, I continued.

“Just put it in my inbox when you get it done. No hurry, though.”

“Oh, you want me to email it to you?”

Sigh.

“Never mind. Just leave it on the desk.”

Suddenly, I was seized by an intense curiosity as to how deep this intergenerational rabbit hole might go.

“Just for fun, let’s try a word association game,” I said. “I’ll say something, and you tell me the first thing that comes to mind.”

She looked uncertain—possibly a trifle concerned.

“Simonize.”

“Wait . . . was he in Hamilton?”

I stared at her.

“Not that I know of. How about Ben-Gay?”

“Oh,” she replied with a slightly embarrassed tone, “only this one time in college. She was nice enough, but it was really just a phase for me.”

Somewhere, deep in a dusty and forgotten pharmacy aisle, a tube of mentholated analgesic ointment quietly collapsed.

I decided not to pursue this line of inquiry.

“Mimeograph.”

“Is that like . . . a meme?”

I closed my eyes.

“One more. Busy signal.”

At this, she looked at me as though I were a bug under a microscope, popped her earbuds in, and headed up the hallway to the office.

Once she disappeared around the corner, I briefly considered checking my driver’s license to see if it featured a picture of me next to a team of oxen—sporting a waist-length beard and grave expression—bearing the name and address:

Charles Ingalls

137 Little House on the Prairie

De Smet, South Dakota

I sat back down at my desk, mulling over what had just transpired.

Had I actually asked a young lady—clearly flummoxed by my use of the verb “to Xerox”—what the word “mimeograph” brought to mind for her?

As I was beginning to ponder whether I might need to look into having myself carbon dated, a movie scene featuring this young clerk sprang to life in my mind.

*

“Good morning, Dr. K,” she said with a cheery note.

“Call me Ishmael,” I replied gruffly.

“Huh? Well . . . okay. Anyway, here’s your patient list for the day. As requested, I had it printed in purple ink. Why did you want me to do that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

I gazed at the pages in my hand, at that fresh violet glow of modern office efficiency masquerading as institutional antiquity.

“It was the purpleness of the ink,” I muttered under my breath, “that above all things appalled me.”

She blinked like a frog in a hailstorm.

“Soooo . . . do you want to start with room 214 today?”

I handed the list back to her and said, “I need this Xeroxed first, if you have a second.”

“Xeroxed?” She looked puzzled as she took the list back.

“Yes. Copied. You know. Xeroxed.”

“Oh. You mean printed?”

“Well, no, not printed exactly. I mean copied. Although I suppose now it might be scanned and then printed, which is not really the same thing, but functionally—”

Ka-CHUNK!

“—functionally adjacent.”

Ka-CHUNK!

“What was that?” she asked with a look of alarm.

“Oh, nothing. Just the sound of office technology from my childhood starting up somewhere in the back of my skull.”

Ka-CHUNK!

“Uh-huh. Okay . . . so just one copy?”

“Yes, please. Before I start explaining carbon paper.”

*

Like the Herman Melville character in Moby-Dick, I, too, have seen a white whale.

Long before the HP LaserJet, there was a mimeograph machine at Indian Hills Community College in Centerville, Iowa, where both my parents worked.

It was a genuine A.B. Dick.

Rather than white, it was mint green, because of course it was. Not gray. Not beige.

Mint green.

The sort of mint green that did not merely suggest the 1960s, but arrived from that era wearing false eyelashes and carrying a bottle of pills in its patent-leather handbag. It looked less like office equipment than a set decoration from Valley of the Dolls, quietly waiting for Patty Duke in go-go boots to storm past it on her way to a nervous breakdown.

The office where it was located had once been the home of E.F. Ritter, M.D., one of Centerville’s venerable old family doctors and surgeons—and the man who’d removed my appendix when I was six. In its day, the house had been palatial by local standards. By the time I knew it, though, it had been carved into offices—the domestic rooms repurposed for schedules, budgets, paperwork, and the general low-grade hum of community college administration.

It printed everything in slightly blurry purple ink, as if the documents had been produced by a squid with clerical training, and it operated with the mechanical confidence of a machine that knew exactly how funny its own name was—and refused to acknowledge it.

I remember the place where the paper fed into the machine. It featured a large tray spanned by a metal bar, fitted with two grayish rubber rollers, rough and dusty to the touch. I can still feel them under my fingertips, that odd dry drag of old rubber, the sort of texture only a child would think to investigate because children are forever touching the parts of the world adults have stopped noticing.

It always seemed to exude a faintly unpleasant air. It was not the machine itself that was unsettling, although the name A.B. Dick gave a boy of my age plenty to work with. Nor was it the slow mechanical churn, or the damp medicinal smell, or the way every page emerged looking faintly ashamed of itself.

No. It really was the purpleness of the ink that above all things appalled me.

*

Even now, after all these years, I can close my eyes and visualize its monochromatic violet output: school notices, exams, meeting agendas, memos, forms, schedules—all damply duplicated in the unmistakable and literally purple prose of institutional necessity. The mimeograph did not print documents so much as stamp them out one page at a time.

Ka-CHUNK! Ka-CHUNK! Ka-CHUNK!

During the 1980s, mimeographs gradually fell into disuse as Xerox photocopiers became the new standard. These were far more popular for a host of reasons. As teenagers, we discovered certain unapproved and non-traditional uses for them as well.

For example, we could lift the lid and squeeze our faces onto the glass, taking these wonderfully black-and-white funhouse-type images of ourselves. Once we’d stumbled onto that, things began to deteriorate rather quickly.

We reckoned if you could Xerox your face, why not other body parts? Soon, we were taking handprints, footprints, you name it. We thought it particularly hilarious to slip Xeroxes of one of us “flipping the bird” into a classmate’s Trapper Keeper, signed with things like, “For my loving friend . . .”

Things finally came to a head when, while several of the high school band students were briefly left without adult supervision in the rehearsal room, one of the drummers discovered that it afforded him an entirely new way of “mooning” someone . . . smartly collated and stapled, no less.

Try doing that with your A.B. Dick and you’d end up in the emergency room.

Ka-CHUNK!

Anyway, once the band director got wind of our study hall activities while he was outside on a smoke break, he took to locking up the Xerox machine when he wasn’t using it.

Oh well, it was fun while it lasted.

*

I do not wish to suggest that I’m old. However, when I can no longer say “Xeroxed” in front of a young person without their face assuming the expression dogs get when they hear a kazoo, I’m forced to draw certain conclusions.

Still, I find that aging is not without its amusements. At some point, if you’re lucky, you stop being merely older and become archival. You’re allowed to be the sort of person who says “Xeroxed” in public and then has to explain themselves to someone young enough to regard the fax machine as steampunk.

This is not their fault. Language evolves. Technology changes. The world moves on.

But the past does not entirely disappear. Traces of it remain, lurking in certain verbs, waiting for some unfortunate fifty-seven-year-old physician to spring “Xeroxed” on an unsuspecting young lady and expose himself as a living fossil.

While the young may not know it, they speak antique more often than they realize. They “hang up” phones that have not hung anywhere in years. They “rewind” videos that contain no tape. They “dial” numbers on devices with no such mechanism. They “cc” people without carbon paper.

And the young clerk? To her credit, she did eventually make me a copy.

Not a Xerox, of course. Not in the old sense. And certainly not a mimeograph. No purple ink, no damp paper, no mint-green contraption wheezing in the corner like a sea monster with a service contract.

Just a copy.

Which was all I had asked for in the first place.