I'm reading Before We Were Yours and it's pretty good, but that's not the point right now. I just got to a part where the protagonist reads a typewriter ribbon in order to find out what someone wrote and I DID THAT IN REAL LIFE!
When I was 19, I worked for a psychotic woman at a major newsweekly magazine in NYC. It was the late '70s and I was hired as a secretary in the advertising production department (where the magazine is laid out, deciding where the ads would go etc.). I showed an interest in learning the more technical aspects of the job and initially, she liked that. But soon her boss, our VP, took notice and he told her to give me more and more responsibility which rattled her. She became vindictive and weird, and everyone saw it. She'd loudly accuse me of doing ridiculous things to sabotage her (like hiding or throwing out paperwork, etc.).
When things were really coming to a head, I suspected she had written a memo to her boss that was full of lies about me. They were both off on Mondays (they worked the Tues-Sat shift because of the news cycle), so when I saw the sealed envelope on his desk, I went into her office and removed the ribbon from her IBM Selectric typewriter. The imprint of the whole memo was there, but it was backwards AND the letters were struck in a zigzag pattern to use as little ribbon as possible when typing. Still, I managed to decipher it and prepare my rebuttal for what I knew would be a contentious meeting the next day with her and her boss.
It was a beautiful thing, pre-empting all of her bullshit while gleefully taking in the sheer bafflement on her face. She could not for the life of her figure out how I knew all the crap she had written, since it was completely fabricated. Her boss reamed her out and told her to grow up. Then he offered me half a sandwich. #truestory
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