FOURTH INSTALLMENT: RIDICULOUS THINGS NANCY WANTS

A Ditto Machine!!! I love the nostalgic smell, and I want my kids to know the smell, too.

Anybody my age (34) or older should remember the lovely Ditto machine and its yummy purple copies. Remember when the teacher would come back from the teachers’ office with a stack of quizzes or worksheets, fresh off the copier? She’d hand them out, and if we were lucky, they would still feel cold and wet. We would all immediately hold them to our noses and inhale, deeply, before the spirit duplicator fluid dried and the stink dissipated (we didn’t know what it was; we just loved the way it stunk). I sat near the front of the row so I’d get to sniff the whole stack. DEEE-LICIOUS!!! There was no smell better than that. It could almost make even pop quizzes seem enjoyable.
It breaks my heart that people as old as my coworker, Dan, 25, never experienced the wonder of the Ditto Machine. So, I want one. They are hard to find, but they do, in fact, still exist. We had one in the math building at USNA as late as 1995. I wonder if it is still there….