278: Spies Like Us
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When my friend Jack was 22, he got a job on a small newspaper in Bend, Oregon. But basically, he just talked his way into this job through sheer force of personality. You know, nothing about journalism or what you're supposed to do in writing a newspaper story. One of his first assignments was a local school budget meeting. Everybody else's story was, you know, 350 words, 600 words, mine was 7,000 words. Which I had just written every word that had occurred at the budget meeting, which was eight hours long. Like in chronological order. In chronological order. The meeting began at 9 a.m. You know, the first issue was how many number two lead pencils to buy from Portland and can we get a deal from Salem instead? Months past, Jack gets better at this job, has friends in the newsroom, there are people younger and greener getting hired, which makes me feel a little better, and he feels like he's getting the hang of things, gets what seems like a very nice bonus. Now, this paper, the Ben Bulletin, was owned by a guy named Robert Chandler. Jack remembers him wearing a 10 gallon hat to work and smacking young reporters in the head was shrunken wide if they made grammatical errors. And Chandler had installed long before many big city newspapers had them, a computer network in the newsroom. It was 1980, personal computers, word processing, passwords, all of this stuff, it was all brand new. So one late afternoon, it was an afternoon paper, so after, you know, closing, everybody fled pretty much. And I was sitting there by myself, and I was just fooling around with the computer, and I typed in Mr. Chandler's name. You mean as you typed it in as the username? Yeah, as the username, just like, you know, just guessing, what would be a password that Robert Chandler might use? And I had been out to his house, I guess, the week or two before, and I had met his grandson. I don't remember what his name was, but let's just say it's Sam. So I typed in Sam for the password, and bling, all of a sudden, his account opened up. I had access to everything in the entire computer system. The managing editor at the time was a guy named Dick Ronnick. I went into his file, and they were all the bonuses, and I made, I can't remember, but I think it was like $7,800 a year. And he had given me like a $400 bonus. And I saw everybody's bonus, and I saw everybody's annual paycheck, and I was at the bottom of the list. I was doing the worst of everybody in the room. I mean, I was flattened. Because you looked around the newsroom, and you just thought, "These are my peers." Not only my peers, but there were some of them that I thought were worse than I was. And I had to come to terms with the fact that I wasn't there equal. I was bad. I was really bad at what I was trying to do. It meant I suddenly had these weird resentments of my colleagues. Because, you know, part of what's horrifying about finding out information that you're not supposed to know is that it actually robs you of your own kind of self-deception,
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