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Darkness had just fallen as I made my way to my hotel in Miami last Monday.
Suddenly from behind I heard a voice proclaiming that the solution to the problems of the world lay in people having sex more frequently.
A warm drizzle had just started and the wind was picking up. It was hard to follow exactly what was being said, in what was a profanity-filled monologue.
It was the night before Donald Trump was due to appear in court in Miami and I wanted to stop by a supermarket to get some provisions. Tuesday was going to be a long day.
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As I climbed the steps to enter the store, I thought I had heard the last from the voice behind me in the street. But no, it followed me in and passed right by me into the supermarket.
It turned out to be a man with a beard, probably in his 30s.
He was not just ranting to someone on his mobile, as I had suspected.
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Rather, a device was holding a phone in front of his face and its camera was recording what he was saying as he went along.
Not a fan
In the fruit and vegetables aisle he turned to politics. He obviously was not a fan of either Joe Biden or Donald Trump, the likely (at this stage) candidates to contest the presidential election next year.
“What do those old guys know about anything?” he said loudly, before repeating it for effect.
He may have gone on to set out who he actually wanted to see in the White House. However, I never got to hear this as he disappeared into the crowd by the frozen food section.
Who he was, what he was talking about or how many people would actually watch it, I do not know.
But he was obviously a modern media multi-tasker, who spent his Monday night recording his video blog or streaming himself live as he did his shopping.
It was a long way from the notebook and pen era of journalism in which I began working.
However, within hours that era of notebook and pen was to make a dramatic comeback.
A judge had ruled on Monday night, probably as I was in the supermarket, that cameras, audio recording and even mobile phones were to be banned from the courtroom where Trump would appear the next day.
Courtroom
The ground had just been taken from underneath the way US cable television news covers big events, which usually involves live footage, generally played on a loop.
A few reporters were allowed in the courtroom to witness Trump becoming the first former president to plead in a criminal case brought against him by the federal government.
However they would remain there, incommunicado, until the arraignment process was over. This could take up to an hour – an eternity in the modern era of instant breaking news.
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There was an overflow room from which another group of reporters could view proceedings on a CCTV link.
However, the court order barred all electronic devices from the premises. Without phones or laptops, there would not even be tweets about events as they played out.
Broadcaster CNN came up with its own plan to get around the problem.
It employed a modern version of the old policy of using runners to bring notes of what was going on to the outside world.
The TV company hired local high school students to do the running.
Pay phones
Two reporters watching the TV link in the overflow room wrote out notes which the students then quickly brought to one of their classmates who was standing by at one of the few pay phones in the court building. These phones could only dial a local Miami number, so a student left a personal mobile in a nearby CNN broadcasting truck.
A CNN manager stationed in the truck outside the courthouse answered the phone, typed up the copy as read over the line by the student and sent it to Washington DC, where the network’s anchors and political pundits told viewers what had happened and what it all meant.
However, there was another unforeseen problem, apparently.
As some reporters gathered in the overflow room, having left all phones, laptops and other electronic devices outside the building, they discovered that they were unable to tell the time.
The reporters relied generally on their phones for this. Luckily one of the students had an old-fashioned, non-electronic watch.