I loved this story in today’s O: County attorney’s eBay sales checked ^[1]. Bottom line? If you’re going to sell goods stolen from your employer, best wait for more than five years before trying to offload them, hmmm? And using an eBay account that contains your first name will probably make it harder to prove you had ‘noTHINK’ to do with it, no?

For those who didn’t see the article: Alert Intel security investigator recovers two laptops once owned by the company – both reported ‘lost’ after former employees departed in November 2000 – on eBay after noting that the seller lives in Hillsboro. The husband, Elmer Dickens, is an assistant county counsel for Washington county; his wife Tami works for Intel – as a finance security analyst, no less. And the eBay account?

“Elmersoldstuff.”

The wife’s excuse is a classic – if unbelievable one: they “made exchanges with people”; she doesn’t know where the laptops came from.

Uh-huh.

I think we ought to set that crack Intel investigator on some more lofty tasks than hunting down five-year-old missing laptops, though. Isn’t Osama bin Laden still missing somewhere in Afghanistan…?

Update: Someone just told me via email that Community Newspapers’ Washington
County reporter AmyJo Brown actually should get credit for breaking the story in the Forest Grove News Times ^[2] yesterday. Apparently the story’s not online (boo hiss), but my informant tells me that “she got better detail from original investigative documents than the O” offered up.

Side note: Can I just say how annoying The O’s habit of not crediting other news sources is? They’re oh-so-quick to praise themselves (’as reported by The Oregonian in our exclusive ongoing series’ blah blah blah in every single story about meth or Police Bureau pension payments, for example), but leave out details like WWeek’s work in the Goldschdmidt story, PGE coverage, etc. etc etc. How hard would it have been to give the small local weekly a bit of credit here…?