AT SEA WITH A TYPEWRITER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3134, 11 September 1922, Page 8

AT SEA WITH A TYPEWRITER.

A day in the life of a ship's stenographer is about as varied an experience as you could find anywhere. I have just completed my first round trip as'official shorthand writer to the passengers in a, White Star liner, and 1 now understand why the head ot the department who sent me afloat asked me if I could keep a secret when he offered mo this job. [ have been confidential secretary to steel kings, pork kings, and cinema kings. T have learned things about the inner workings of the world's big businesses that would be worth small fortunes to ingenious speculators. I have learned of ramifications of big businesses that I certainly never suspected before. And I have learned queer things about the personalities ol the big men who direct those businesses Their ways of dictating letters hctrav them to some extent. There is the man who knows exactly what to sav and says it at about a, hundred and twenty words a minute without stopping or' altering a word. There is the man who. when he has the typed letter goes through and almost entirely rewrites it—an annoying type to anv expert stenographer. there is the man who brings in the draft letter hurriedly scrawled on a scrap ol paper, ami leaves you to put in the grammar, the stops, and sometimes the sense The first type isi generally the hcaO of a big go-ahead concern that has made manv daring moves and never Jooked back. The second, annoying though he is, is generally the head ot a solid, old-established concern ol which the world at large hears little. but of which the business world knows the worth. The third type is usually connected with the arts, the theatre. the cinema, or (strange as it may seem) literature. A colleague in another ship told me that the worst, task he ever bad was with the drafts of a famous novelist. . . Typing out diaries' for visitors returning from Europe is not unusual. Mostly they are very ordinary records. The ship's stenographer has to do a good deal of the ship's business as well as that for the passengers, so that he is kept pretty hard at it all through the voyage. Personally, my first trip gave me an average of twelve hours a day, but as it was only for eleven days out of the seventeen, and I was free fur a good deal of the time in New \ork. things levelled themselves.