I knew the newspaper was about to sell when my old cigar-chomping boss sent me out to wash the delivery van. We never washed that van. It was supposed to be white, but it was a fairly dark shade of gray.

A few days later we sent the manual typewriters out to be cleaned. They thought would impress the new regime. Pretty ironic as the first thing the new company did was bring in a bunch of Macintosh computers.

Before that I had to bang out all my copy on an old Royal typewriter, then hand it to the typesetter. She entered everything into the big blue machine which converted everything into column-wide strips.

The computers freaked everyone out. I had at least messed around on a TRS-80 before, so I adapted, but others just could not or would not. Classified ads disappeared. A public notice got saved in the utility folders and the Sheriff’s office had to postpone an auction.

Work flow went to shit.

My old publisher and his wife were still there, but they’d been busted down to reporter. They wouldn’t touch their computers. They continued cranking out stories on their manual typewriters and handed them to me.

I then had to retype into the computer. After a few weeks, the new publisher got fed up and had all the typewriters removed from the building.

Did that ever stir up shit. The old guard was not happy. They thought I was a computer nerd because I knew how to do things like save and print. (If only they could see me now – in completely over my head when it comes to tech.)

I can’t remember who went in what order, but one by one the old staff decided to “pursue other opportunities.”

A lady who was struggling to learn bookkeeping on a Mac took charge of the going away parties. An employee would reach their limit and she’d head to the grocery store for cake and punch.

One day I got back from an interview with a coach just in time to see party planner lady peeling out in the parking lot, flipping the bird out the window on her way out.

I came in the back door to find everyone standing around in shock. I said, “So are we gonna have a cake?”