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RICK MacLEAN: David Cadogan was a newsman. I loved him for it

I didn’t have a job and I needed one.

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That’s what happens when you start a master’s degree in international affairs in Ottawa, then look around the room and realize you’re not even the tenth smartest person there.

I bailed and went home. Never regretted it. But it meant that fall, at the ripe old age of 22ish, I needed a job.

There was only one place to go, the unemployment office. They were more honest about the name back then. They later changed it to the employment office.

The guy behind the desk looked at me, probably shook his head in wonder at why I’d left a free year of education at Carleton University to live in my parent’s basement, and flipped through the distressingly thin pile of sheets of paper in front of him.

“Can you type?” he asked.

“Sure,” I replied. I lied. This was 1980 and who typed? There was no internet, that took another 14 years or so. Google and Facebook? More like 25 years. I’d written every paper in my university career by hand. With a pen.

“Well, the newspaper is looking for a reporter,” he said.

Every bar in the book

The address in hand, I marched to the nearby newspaper, climbed the shockingly steep stairs – no one worried anyone with a disability back them. Besides, the printing press occupied the ground floor and it weighed more than all the staff on........

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