“The Capital Register & Press is a fine and proud newspaper, but it is woefully behind the times, in facilities as well as news concepts. This is the beginning of a new day for the CR&P. Now, I would like you to meet Miss Gail Overstreet, who will be the leader of the tutorial group that will instruct all of you in the use of our fine new computers. Miss Over-street.”
The lady, tall and lithe with long dark hair worn in the style of the knockout woman lawyer on “Hill Street Blues,” stepped up next to Shiu, whose head barely reached her bosom.
“Are you afraid?” she asked, pausing dramatically. “Afraid of these machines? Don’t answer—I’ve been through these scenes a dozen times and I know that many of you are—except for those of you who have computers at home. Anybody?”
Farley Free, the second sports man, and Mo Gealber, the business writer, raised their hands, both looking sheepishly around as if they had just admitted peeking into a girls’ locker room.
“Excellent. You two gentlemen will be of value to me and my two associates in the coming weeks. But let me caution you all. These machines are not your simple fun-in-the-living-room toys. What you see here are powerful terminals which are the simplest peripherals of a rather sophisticated main frame computer being installed in a room on the first floor of this building. They are not toys. They are the tools that will permit you to produce a newspaper faster and better than any of you had dreamed possible.
“Mr. Shiu said that this is a modern newsroom. Ladies and gentlemen, it is one step beyond that. It is the media production environment of the next century. You are the last of your profession who will use such antiquated implements as pencils and pens and scissors and paste to publish a newspaper. You are the last who will have to wrestle with paper to put out a paper.”
She spread her arms wide and smiled like she had just discovered a cure for the common cold. “Welcome, my friends, to the electronic newsroom!”
Most of us looked at one another as if this broad had just announced that we were about to board a spaceship for Mars. But Shiu and Swift began applauding, joined by Fargo, the eternal company man, and then by about half of the staff. They didn’t know why the hell they were clapping, but they dutifully beat their palms just the same in case it was something important.
(A week later, after I had managed to get into the Over-street underwear, I asked what had been the purpose of that speech inasmuch as the staff had no choice about using the new machines. “The opening remarks are for the management,” she said. “It makes them feel smart, having plunked down all that dough for a bunch of machines they don’t know the first thing about and probably will never learn to use. But the rest was for you working stiffs.”)
And the rest of the speech was just that. Dick Mooniman, our police reporter, said the last time he heard something like that was his first day at Parris Island—back when the Marine drill instructors didn’t have to worry about some momma’s boy writing his congressman to complain he had been made to march in a swamp with real snakes.
What the lovely Miss Overstreet told us, in brief, was that (1) we would have a reasonable time to learn to use the computers, (2) two weeks of two-hour-a-day after-work training was a reasonable time, and (8) anyone who couldn’t cut it in that time either was too slow to ever work in the “electronic newsroom” or was doping off. Either way, the message came clear, it was swim or sink in two weeks.
After that, the lady read off a list of names assigned to her and two other instructors. I was on her list along with Cindy Korth, my statehouse backup, Judy Teach, the city hall reporter, Mooniman, Bill Grace, and Shep Carley.
The training started that afternoon. She was good at it and patient with those of us who had just barely mastered the manual typewriter before the computer and Gail Overstreet came into our lives.
I, of course, fell in love with the teacher. Maybe it was that long and thick black hair, or maybe the challenge of breaking through that steel-edged control she maintained on the job. It took about four days and a couple pitchers of martinis to get behind that facade and discover that she was just as tough as met the eye, but also just as lonesome as any traveling salesman gets on the road.
I was fascinated; this was a new kind of woman to me. I had married young because it had seemed the thing to do in those days and found myself alternately bored and angered by the constraints of nesting. So I strayed early and often, looking for something I couldn’t describe and never really found. Most of what I discovered was a variety of sex and what it got me was a divorce.
All of us learned how to use that computer in the allotted two weeks and, with the benefit of some very private “hands on” tutoring from Gail, I learned some other things about the system that were to be valuable.
Gail gave each of us a “password” that was supposed to safeguard our notes and other confidential material we might otherwise store in locked file cabinets or shoeboxes in the back of a closet. Later, she told me what anyone with any logical sense would have realized—that the passwords were stored in a directory in the computer so it could recognize legitimate users. Anyone who knew how to decode the passwords would be able to read anything in the system. Later than that, just before the two weeks and our brief romp ended with Gail’s departure for another assignment, she told me how to find that directory. There was a price, but it was a relatively palatable one.
I used what Gail told me and an offhand remark by a colleague not long after that to discover what Shin and Swift were up to.
CHAPTER 3
Ordinarily, I had a drink or two after work at the bar in the Clark Hotel, where in season you usually could find a member of the legislature and almost always a lobbyist or two eager to pop for a jar in return for an ear or an answer.
On that last, my conscience was clear: I never gave a lobbyist information that I had not first used in a story. But somehow, they seemed to think they were getting a better brand of news over a $1.75 martini than they could from a two-bit paper. The way I looked at it, when the paper started paying wages that could support my modest thirst, I would be more selective in my drinking companions—and even buy once in a while myself. Meantime, the lobbyists were contributing to the upkeep of a free and independent press by buying their news twice.
During the computer training period, I spent a lot more time than usual in the office, and after the sessions, when I wasn’t pursuing the teacher, at the Next Door with Grace, Carley, and people like Drew Claggett, Judy Teach, and Farley Free, all of whom had a lively sense of gossip and no need to rush home after work.
Before Shiu and Swift arrived, the talk at the fyar was mostly sports and gossip about who was trying to get whom into bed. I didn’t care that much about sports and I was more interested in making gossip than listening to it, so the Next Door usually didn’t hold that much attraction to me. But with the arrival of the new management, Topic A was the paper and what was going to happen to it and us.
The first hint came about a week after the computers arrived. I had struck out trying to date Gail Overstreet and was seeking solace and company in the booth usually occupied by CR&P staffers. We were talking about an item that had run on page two of that day’s edition. It had a one-column headline in relatively modest type:
MAZTJNDI, Zardia (NP)—Qratou tribal chief Rawlndl Azabandi recently passed a sentence of death on two tribesmen who were caught milking a ritual goat, travelers returning to this capital from the interior reported.