Unless the Intertron doesn’t work.
This week the News’ office Intertron went down for about three crucial early morning hours, meaning no news could be gathered or reported apart from the price of takeaway coffee and what a man at Riverside Plaza in Kialla had to say about the refurbishment of Mooroopna’s Watt Rd bridge for another 10 years. It was interesting, but not reportable without attracting obscenity laws.
As our network boffins scampered around in white coats pulling wires from a giant Star Trek switchboard, I decided to clean out my desk.
I was going to show these millennial cub reporters how we used to bring the news to people through dogged street-pounding, using spit, pen and notebooks with blue fingers bleeding from carbon paper and Imperial typewriters.
But when I reached into a drawer for a pen, it wouldn’t open because it was jammed with notebooks, hairballs, dead moths and clunky old stuff like Dictaphones.
When I eventually prised the drawer open, there was more wonderful stuff from yesteryear, including a World War II Herald newspaper with headlines like Blitz turned on German cities: Heavy attacks by RAF.
I remember it well.
I think I’ve still got the classic Daily Mirror front page which blared: British push bottles up Germans in Africa.
They don’t write them like that any more.
I also found 30 years of notebooks, staplers and staples, sticky tape dispensers, sticky post-it notes, fountain pens, a pair of scissors, a spike, a silver paper opener which looked Edwardian, and a giant thesaurus packaged into a strange thing we used to use called a book.
Of course, this was all before we moved to the paperless office 25 years ago. Now, information is invisibly transmitted through the air with no need for dead trees and ink. Unless someone phones up and wants to tell you a story. Then, the hunt is on for a notebook and pen.
But that’s another story.
Then among the debris I found a few small things I couldn’t identify. They could have been ancient Egyptian mummy teeth or early Greek abacus counters. Then I realised they were old USB sticks. How quaint.
I thought, this is wonderful timing just before Christmas. So I wandered around the office handing out staplers and sticky post-it notes and everyone thought I was so kind and organised with my presents.
No-one wanted the sticky tape dispensers which looked like Art Nouveau door stoppers.
So I kept them as Christmas pressies for my modernist Melbourne in-laws.
When the Intertron came back on I was almost disappointed. It was nice to remember how things were when journalists wore trilby hats and everyone smoked and tea ladies came around with trolleys and sticky buns and reporters licked their Biros in the street.
But it was also nice when Google returned and I didn’t have to lick my blue fingers any more.
John Lewis is a journalist at The News.
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