A SLICE OF LIFE The new trend in writing has got our columnist Lori Borgman's grandkids flinging aside their hot tech toys.

Lori Borgman finds the funny in everyday life, writing from the heartland of the US. Now, if she could just find her car keys…

We are the proud owners of the coolest toy ever— an old IBM Selectric typewriter. We rock, baby.

We got the typewriter from a sweet neighbour who is downsizing. She had kept the machine in perfect condition for some five decades.

We lugged the heavy mint green monster into the house, heaved it up on the kitchen table, removed the dust cover, plugged it in and listened to that baby purr.

Music to our ears.

We inserted a piece of paper and I typed a few lines.

My fingers flew and the little round ball spun around, flinging letters onto the paper. It worked like a charm.

Except for the typos. I’d need some of that correction tape. Do they sell it anymore?

The next day, some of the grandkids arrived, immediately noticed the odd-looking machine and cautiously circled it.

‘What is it?' one timidly asked.

‘What do you think it is?'

‘Well, it sort of looks like a computer. It has the same letters on it.’

‘It’s an electric typewriter,’ I said. ‘A typerider?’

‘No, a typewriter. Watch this,’ I said. I sat down in front of it.

I turned it on. It started to hum and they all jumped three feet in the air.

It was like the first time man saw fire. Frightening, but intriguing.

I typed a few lines and they all oohed and aahed.

‘What?’ one of them exclaimed. ‘You don’t need a printer?’

All the grandkids clamoured for a turn in front of the new-fangled, incredibly fascinating machine called a typerider

‘No! It prints as you go! Isn’t that incredible?’ They were spellbound.

‘What will they think of next, right?’ I asked. ‘And see this silver ball in here? There are four others just like it, each one with a different type font.’

‘Whoa!’ they shouted.

A few feet away sat my laptop, a high-speed computer with 300 fonts, auto-correct, spellchecker, grammar-checker, a built-in dictionary and thesaurus, linked to a laser printer that can crank out 20 pages a minute. Big whoop.

They all clamoured for a turn in front of the new-fangled, incredibly fascinating machine called a typerider.

‘Form a line,’ I shouted. ‘Single file! Single file.’ This was amazing! Why hadn’t we shown them this before? Could their mom and dad get one, too? Does Amazon have them?

One after another, they ripped paper out of the typewriter and came running to show us what they had written.

‘Beautiful!’ I said, looking at askdjdklfeiruodsdkmdkdfjlf djskfjdljlskdjddkkdd. ‘Read it to me!’

‘One day there was a mermaid. She was a pretty mermaid.’

‘I think you have a writing career ahead of you.’

They all howled when it was time to turn off the machine because they all had more bestsellers to write.

We assured them the typewriter would be waiting when they returned.

In the meantime, we’re looking into whether we can hook up an old tabletop rotary dial phone salvaged from the 1950s. They’ll be ecstatic.