Situation: During my stint as a staff writer on TIME’s masthead, I wrote stories for many sections of the magazine including Nation, Press, Sport and People. A particularly tricky assignment was an article about Playboy Enterprises for the Economy and Business section of the August 4, 1975 edition. 

Challenge: I began writing the piece on Tuesday for a one-column space. It might have been a slow news week or it might have been that the editors liked the idea of putting Playboy Bunny pictures in the story: either way, by Thursday night the article had grown to four times its original assigned length.

Response: At 2 a.m. Friday morning I rolled up my latest rewrite (composed on a manual typewriter, of course) and took it to the pneumatic tube station. That was the technology we used to send text
to the copy desk one floor below in the days before e-mail. Punch drunk after many versions, I inserted my story unto the vacuum tube without first putting it in a canister. Within seconds, my hard-hitting journalism was confetti.

Result: I had learned from an article about John Le Carre, whom I idolized, that he wrote all his books longhand. I decided to adopt the practice, and it was a good thing I did. I was able to retrieve all the pages I’d tossed into my 30-gallon wastepaper basket. By sun up, I had pieced the story back together and sent it on to posterity -- in a canister.