Fighting with a Word Processor - Remember those?

This week I've been in a local office filling in while the secretary is out at a convention. Each time I go into a new office, I get to re-acquaint myself with different types of office machinery.
Today's challenge was a word processor. Now if you were born in the 90's you have no idea what I'm talking about, so you may want to go read another blog. However, if you run across on of these machines.. watch out!
In the old days there was something called a typewriter..years later they made this machine called a word processor. This was a new thing that everyone loved because it would go back and correct your mess-ups for you if you hit a button. NO more white out! This was also the end to carbon paper, as by this time the copy machine came out. (not that I messed with carbon paper much!)
This word processor was a lot easier to type on and so your papers could be completed a lot faster! Whee! I remember getting one when I was in 8th grade. I was so excited. It had a carry case too! I did all my high school papers on it, however, computers were becoming affordable to regular people by college so it collected dust my college years. Not real sure whatever became of it as I didn't care.
Oh! I'm off topic, sorta. Today I got to mess with one again. I hadn't seen one in an office in quite a long time!
Today was my day to get a newsletter printed,folded and sorted by zip code into a bulk mail container. Got it. Been awhile, but I remembered quickly and achieved my goal. However, the paper that goes to the post office, it has little blanks in it that have to be filled out and it will be a whole lot more clear if one types the information inside. (that and that's what I was told to do!)
HORROR! Okay, taking a deep breath I flipped the switch to on. The machine cranked up..I rolled the paper in, proud I remembered which buttons to push to do that.. and lined up the paper so that I could type in the first square. Simple, right? Ha! Not for me, Not today anyway!
I made sure that my caps lock wasn't on, and the number lock was off and proceeded to click the number three to put today's date in the blank. The word processor here had other ideas. I pushed 3 but got a plus sign. Thinking I was nuts..I tried again. Same thing. Okay.. I flipped the switch from WP to type thinking maybe since this was a kind I'd never used before maybe I just needed to reset. No. That wasn't it. It was now giving me a lower case "t" when I pressed the number 3 key. I then stopped and looked around the office. I figured I must be on camera somewhere and someone in the back was rolling in the floor watching my frustration.
I then took the piece of paper out, got a blank one and decided to see what would happen pressing various letters and numbers and see if I could get some sort of pattern going. All this clacking drew the attention of the guy in the closest office to me. Deciding to see if he was in on it, I asked him to humor me and come type his name out for me. He amused me and came over and became very frustrated as the same thing happened to him. ( I was thrilled!) HE asked me if I was messing with him! Laughing I assured him I was not.
We both had a good laugh over the combination of letters that we would get pressing the number keys and vice versa. We turned it off and on several times and pressed some menu buttons and some of the F line keys as sometimes they have various functions.
Apparently we were having such a good time that the guys in the back wanted to know what we were having such a good time over and they came to join in the fun. After everyone had a turn and realized that this machine was truly messed up, then the ideas of what we could do to the machine started surfacing. One voted to drop it off the roof, one wondered how often it gets used, another why do we even have such a piece of equipment here, and then the one who likes to guilt and tease folks said, "Well, you broke it!"
After everyone had their turn to poke fun at me or the machine or both.. things settled down and everyone returned to work. Me? I just filled in the blanks with my pen!