Please Pack my Box With ...

My grandfather owned a junk yard. He didn't like to call it that. To him, it was a "salvage operation."

To everyone else though, the words "junk yard" sufficed.

He passed away a year and a half go. As a result, his business was auctioned off. Most of it went to scrappers who came in and bought up the metal.

I was there, not buying, but taking pictures. Those pictures have been languishing on a memory card since then. I hadn't addressed them. The auction had been too sad.

But I dug them out the other day. Among them was this shot, a close up of a piece of paper that had been threaded through an old-fashioned typewriter. The typewriter was outside in a pile of scrap metal. The piece of paper had been there for who knows how long.

It reads:

Please pack my box with seven dozen lacquer jugs.

What? What kind of a sentence was that?

I promptly emailed it to my uncle, a man with a deep love for all things odd, who wrote back with an answer.

The sentence, according to him, should have read:

Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs.

It's similar, he said, to:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.

I was lost and confused. I had no idea what either one of these sentences meant. But now I know. Each one contains every letter of the alphabet.

Apparently, back in the day, typing teachers used to make their students practice their keyboarding skills by typing these sentences over and over.

Hmmm. I don't remember that. Have I just dated myself?