Last week The New York Times published names, pics and profiles of 45 people working for Elon Musk, at DOGE. They look a lot like I and my colleagues looked like, in my first job at a newsletter publisher 30-some years ago. So enthusiastic. So full of life. So eager to make their mark!

I remember feeling that way, and working with others who felt the same! As I wrote in a mini-memoir a few years ago, “We were all young together, we were all dumb together, we were all desperate together.”

We fucked each other over, and saw how that felt. We supported each other, and saw how that felt. We talked about each other behind our backs, and said things to each other’s faces. We excluded some people from happy hour, and invited everyone to happy hour. We stood up for each other against management, sometimes. We stood up for ourselves, sometimes. We learned what shit we would and would not eat. We saw Martin Luther King Day become a company holiday before many companies recognized it, when the only two Black employees (they were literally sisters), walked into the President’s office and loudly made the suggestion. “Okay!” we heard the president say.

We made editorial mistakes. And once, we printed a correction that repeated the same mistake we were apologizing for, inspiring the write of the piece to thank us for our “subfecal” copyediting work, and the company founder to gently ask us to stop trying to fix it. “These things tend to snowball,” he said, sadly.

(Hey: Most of us were making less than $30,000 a year; you get what you pay for!)

One night a bunch of us worked late and then got hilariously stoned, Breakfast Club-style, in the founder’s corner office. Another time, a young IT guy got so drunk he was cut off and physically dragged out of a company holiday party before it began. We stayed up until dawn in the middle of conferences we were hosting. People got pregnant in that company, people got married, people got divorced. Lazy people got promoted, crazy people got retained, liars found a sanctuary. (Including an accounts receivable pro who didn’t feel like entering data, and so threw away all the checks.) Some of us thrived at that place, others flamed out (sometimes in the same week!).

And what was the content of our work? We wrote newsletters primarily to deliver useful techniques and insights for our subscribers, who were editors of employee newsletters. “Now let me see if I’ve got this straight,” the writer Calvin Trillin asked one of our colleagues, who was trying to recruit him to speak at one of our conferences, “you write newsletters for people who write newsletters.”

Yes.

We were not, on the other hand, applying our hormone-fueled enthusiasm, our youthful (and often misguided) idealism and our wisdom-free, empathy-free immaculate wits to a madly rushed project of cutting hundreds of thousands of very specific positions in the federal government of the most powerful nation on the planet Earth.

Which I’m awfully glad of, I have to say. Because that probably would have turned out pretty bad.