What the Enron E-mails Say About Us; New Yorker, July 24 Issue

Nathan Heller, New Yorker; What the Enron E-mails Say About Us

"Small, sometimes moving dramas unwind in the folders of sent mail. In May, 2001, a trader who is given to enthusiastic, exclamation-laden e-mails tells a friend that it’s already getting hot in Houston, which is a pain, because he’s begun jogging again, to lose 8.5 pounds. He has just been through a breakup. A vice-president is having a custody battle in September, 2001, and sends a legal aide a frenzied, unedited, and wrenching plea: “How can she be aloud to keep me from my son?” Some of the most interesting messages were never meant for anyone else’s eyes. That same jogger, still romantically at loose ends, e-mails his Hotmail account a link to workouts on fitnessheaven.com. An employee on the legal team sends his personal AOL account a joke he may have found worth mastering. (“Moses, Jesus and an old man are golfing,” it begins.) “Do you know what’s included in Enron’s Code of Ethics?” an e-mail advertising an in-house informational event prompts. “Do you know what policies affect corporate conduct? Ask Sharon Butcher, Assistant General Counsel of Corporate Legal, all your questions about our corporate policies today.” The message was sent on June 5, 2001. Ten weeks later, Jeffrey Skilling resigned as president and C.E.O. A programmed search could find this e-mail, but it wouldn’t be able to locate the irony. For this, we need the same human instrument—faulty, romantic, and duplicitous—that brought Enron to that self-defeating point."