Maybe you can remember back to those halcyon days of the typing pool, or maybe the lone office secretary banging out letters, invoices and statements on a trusty Oliver or Imperial typewriter, before the appearance of the personal computer.

It is not so very long ago, maybe just over a quarter century or so that the seemingly hypnotic clickety clack of the keys and type bars as they hammered out the narrative onto the paper, or every few seconds, that little "ding" which signified the end of another line could be heard in every office.

The one thing I remember more than anything else was the large amount of Tippex bottles on everyone's desk, you know, those little bottles with the screw cap and that insidious little brush that always seemed to dry out long before the bottle was empty.

Thankfully, with the advent of PC's in the workplace, the need for carbon paper, ink ribbon and a supply of Tippex equal to half the worlds' water supply on hand to correct all those mistakes is a thing of the past.

Or is it? It appears that the need for Tippex is still going strong, because in our "paperless office" that was supposed to be heralded by the invention of the word processer, personal computers and servers which store terabytes of information, paper is used in the office more and more, not just for sending out letters and statement etc, but also as a means of backing up records held on servers, memory sticks and disks.

However, it seems we are all still prone to making errors when printing and photocopying, as well as maybe wanting to change something on the printed record when passing from one office to another. Proof reading seems to have flown out of the window, and if the spelling mistakes I se everywhere need to be corrected, that old standby Tippex is always on hand.

In fact, when I was asked to write this, I looked around the office, and as well as finding individual bottles on each desk, I actually found in the stationery cupboard a nest of a dozen or so bottles, so it would appear the species is alive and well and is nowhere near extinction yet.

And, in this P.C. era we live in, I will not even mention the joke about the blonde secretary who had lots of Tippex marks on the monitor screen of her new computer.