ON THE JOB
My Laptop, My Life
A reporter feels the wrath of the information age, where everything is just a click away …until it isn’t
I left my life in a taxicab, and I don’t think I’m ever going to get it back.
I’m exaggerating, slightly. What I actually lost was my laptop. But what it contained was irreplaceable, and what it meant to me is immeasurable. I have been on the road, covering the presidential campaign, since August 2003. This job is a jealous master — even on my brief visits home, my wife, enduring this trying first year of marriage by clinging to my promises of much better after November, has to pull me away from my laptop to eat or sleep. (I learned the hard way to mute the computer so the e-mail chimes don’t ring through our barely furnished home.)
On the road, my laptop was my connection to her. When I powered up, she would stare out at me, smiling a full-screen come-hither smile as she lay in her wedding gown in our bridal suite. During the day, we would speak more through e-mail than phone. My laptop was my connection to everyone: bosses, friends, sources, family. It held my only pictures of my nephews with their ailing great-grandparents; pictures from our campaign-shortened honeymoon; pictures from the campaign trail that I hoped to show my friends when it was all over and I got my life back.
My mother just sold my childhood home, severing one of my few remaining ties to anything with any permanence, and yet that computer, with its gold mine of addresses and correspondence and pictures, held for me the promise of a future permanence, somewhere, someday.
It would preserve me and my identity, so long as I preserved it.
It was my link to the past, too. A few years ago, I spent months interviewing my late grandmother — the font of our family history — in the day room of her nursing home, showing her crumbling nineteenth-century photographs and furiously typing up her stories. Someday I hoped to flesh it out into something more meaningful than a family tree. (I may have once backed up some of that, I think, but I don’t know where.)
And of course, it was my office. The hundreds of interviews and speeches I’d digitally recorded since October? Gone. The 350 campaign sources I developed and carefully typed into my address book? Gone, along with their work, home, and cell-phone numbers and e-mail addresses. When I first lost the computer, I consoled myself with the knowledge that I had put all those names and numbers on my handheld (for the first time in weeks) the very night before. But that backup, it turned out, suffered a glitch. All was lost. It has meant that I’ve had to continually go hat-in-hand to my colleagues for numbers, and although I’ve managed to avoid any catastrophic disruption in my coverage, I have doubtless suffered a loss of context and perspective, namely the ability to go back and check my memories against the recordings and notes I’d amassed.
“You’ll get it back,” other reporters kept saying hopefully. But I kept noticing their facial expressions: hands over mouths. Grimaces. The kinds of looks that cannot be faked. I have become a walking cautionary tale.
The strangest thing is how blurry my memory is of losing it. Even when I first realized I’d lost the laptop — an hour after I got out of a cab in Brookline, Massachusetts, to see an old friend on a rare morning off — I could not quite be sure where I had left it. I went back inside my friend’s house, but the computer was not there. So I took a cab back to the hotel, hoping I’d simply forgotten to take it with me.
The panic I felt was too familiar. Covering a campaign is at least half a test of patience, endurance, and multitasking, and someone leaves something behind nearly every day. What with the packing while half asleep in strange hotels at ungodly hours, the constant movement from planes to buses, and the ceaseless distractions from a dozen directions, I’ve lost my cell phone four times, a handheld once, and frequently mislaid the electronic security card without which I cannot communicate with the newspaper. I even once left my laptop behind after covering a speech.
I replaced my cell phone twice and found it twice. The other items always caught up to me again. This time, I fear, my luck has run out.
All I had to go on was a blank receipt showing the cab company’s name and number. But I’ve put up signs in its garage, persuaded the dispatchers to announce my offer of a big reward, checked with the police lost-and-found desk, and gotten my hotel to check its security videotapes to try to spot my cab number. Nothing has come of it.
Who walks off with a banged-up laptop and keeps it? I ask myself. It has a cracked frame from being dropped on too many tarmacs. Some of the keys barely work. I’d already gotten a replacement and was just waiting for a chance to switch my files over. What kind of person would see the photo of my beautiful wife and not take pity on her husband?
But I also ask myself, Who doesn’t take better care of such precious data?
A few weeks after the loss, my wife and I grabbed a rare night in the same city — we shared a room in a hotel in Times Square. The next morning she asked me to check under the bed. I didn’t bother. She did, and found a wallet containing $970 and a California doctor’s driver’s license and credit cards.
We reached the doctor at his home — he had reported it lost two weeks earlier, a stunning comment on the hotel’s cleaning and security staff — and we overnighted his wallet to him. He called the next day to say we had renewed his “faith in mankind.”
I’m here, if anyone wants to do the same for me. I promise to back up my files every night.
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