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Uh oh, Steve thought. What’s going on here? Why would he need my password? Why would IT, of all people, ask for it?

“What did you say your last name was? And who’s your supervisor?”

“Ramon Perez. Look, I tell you what, when you were hired, there was a form you had to fill out to get your user account, and you had to put down a password. I could look that up and show you we’ve got it on file here. Okay?”

Steve mulled that over for a few moments, then agreed. He hung on with growing impatience while Ramon went to retrieve documents from a file cabinet. Finally back on the phone, Steve could hear him shuffling through a stack of papers.

“Ah, here it is,” Ramon said at last. “You put down the password ‘Janice.’”

Janice, Steve thought. It was his mother’s name, and he had indeed sometimes used it as a password. He might very well have put that down for his password when filling out his new-hire papers.

“Yes, that’s right,” he acknowledged.

“Okay, we’re wasting time here. You know I’m for real, you want me to use the shortcut and get your files back in a hurry, you’re gonna have to help me out here.”

“My ID is s, d, underscore, cramer—c-r-a-m-e-r. The password is ‘pelican I.’”

“I’ll get right on it,” Ramon said, sounding helpful at last. “Give me a couple of hours.”

Steve finished the lawn, had lunch, and by the time he got to his computer found that his files had indeed been restored. He was pleased with himself for handling that uncooperative IT guy so forcefully, and hoped Anna had heard how assertive he was. Would be good to give the guy or his boss an attaboy, but he knew it was one of those things he’d never get around to doing.

Craig Cogburne’s Story

Craig Cogburne had been a salesman for a high-tech company, and done well at it. After a time he began to realize he had a skill for reading a customer, understanding where the person was resistant and recognizing some weakness or vulnerability that made it easy to close the sale. He began to think about other ways to use this talent, and the path eventually led him into a far more lucrative field: corporate espionage.

This one was a hot assignment. Didn’t look to take me very long and worth enough to pay for a trip to Hawaii. Or maybe Tahiti.

The guy that hired me, he didn’t tell me the client, of course, but it figured to be some company that wanted to catch up with the competition in one quick, big, easy leap. All I’d have to do is get the designs and product specs for a new gadget called a heart stent, whatever that was. The company was called GeminiMed. Never heard of it, but it was a Fortune 500 outfit with offices in half a dozen locations—which makes the job easier than a smaller company where there’s a fair chance the guy you’re talking to knows the guy you’re claiming to be and knows you’re not him. This, like pilots say about a midair collision, can ruin your whole day.

My client sent me a fax, a bit from some doctor’s magazine that said GeminiMed was working on a stent with a radical new design and it would be called the STH-100. For crying out loud, some reporter has already done a big piece of the legwork for me. I had one thing I needed even before I got started, the new product name.

First problem: Get names of people in the company who worked on the STH-100 or might need to see the designs. So I called the switchboard operator and said, “I promised one of the people in your engineering group I’d get in touch with him and I don’t remember his last name, but his first name started with an S.” And she said, “We have a Scott Archer and a Sam Davidson.” I took a long shot. “Which one works in the STH- 100 group?” She didn’t know, so I just picked Scott Archer at random, and she rang his phone.

When he answered, I said, “Hey, this is Mike, in the mail room. We’ve got a FedEx here that’s for the Heart Stent STH-100 project team. Any idea who that should go to?” He gave me the name of the project leader, Jerry Mendel. I even got him to look up the phone number for me.

I called. Mendel wasn