And with today, so do I. Played last holdout at Interplay for three days.
My condolences.
A while back my father asked if I could help him type a bunch of pages he only has as scans. Even though there are rougly two hundred of them, he said, they are written with large letters and he already typed up fifty of them. It would be much faster if I would help him out, as he is a very slow typer (which still is an understatement). He said he would dictate the contents and we would be done really quickly.
Admiral Ackbar looked at me and said:
However, I wilfully chose to ingore him and agreed. I can type quite fast, not at a world record pace, but well above average, so I figured I will waste a weekend and a half at best. Alas, the devil, as the proverb goes, is in the details. What are the details? Well, am I glad you asked, lest I would write this complaint without an audience. He got his hands on minutes of meetings of the local municipality dated over a hundred years back, from directly after the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and before the rise of Austro-Fascism (and the Third Reich later). Needless to say that minutes of that age were handwritten.
That would still be not so bad, however, they were handwritten, under severe time constraints, by people with a decidedly poor grasp of grammar and syntax, in the parlance of their time, and most damning of all, in German cursive. Well, how bad can that be? Have a look:
It is not his slow typing that is an issue. Deciphering the texts on the other hand? Very much so.
In case you are interested in comparing German cursive to modern scripts, the first couple of lines read: "[...] eine Subvention von 2000 Kr. zu bewilligen. Dieser Antrag wird einstimmig angenommen. Anschließend darauf verliest G. Ruckteschel einen Brief des Schriftführers der Lokalorganisation um Anschaffung eines Kastens zur Aufbewahrung der schriftlichen Agenden. Diesem Wunsche wird einstimmig Rechnung getragen."
The second to last word of the seventh line illustrates one of the issues rather well. The word is schriftlichen, and as you can see, the letters used for s, f and h are dreadfully similar to each other when written hastily, and there is very little difference between the t and the l. Good thing these letters are not so commonly used in Germanic languages. Dodged a bullet, huh?
Minor historical fact, it was Hitler who did away with both German cursive and Fraktur, the blackletter typeface used to print German books, with the Normalschrifterlass in 1941, saying they were Jewish letters and calling them German is wrong.