Dear dimwit on the phone

Is he going to play football at Florida? /crossthread

 

Dear PR carpet bomber for secondary suite market firm: There's no apostrophes in Buckeyes or Ducks.

 

That's a pet peeve of mine.

 

Another gem earlier this week: Someone from youth soccer league calls and says the person who used to send their announcements in is no longer on the board, no one picked up their job, their bylaws say meeting must be publicized in the Podunk Fishwrap and Shopping News, and is their any way I can look this up?

"No, but you can search on our website."

"You don't keep a customer file?"

"No."

"When Little League sends something in, what do you do?"

"I run it for them, I don't keep track of it."


Or, as the saying goes, this is a "you" problem, not a "me" problem.

 

We've gotten multiple e-mails this basketball season saying we don't give Podunk High's best player enough ink. He's approaching 1,000 career points, and will likely reach it on Friday night.

I suggested that we dedicated all of B1 to serve as a shrine to said player for his amazing accomplishment. Too much?

 

I had a JV girls basketball coach call in and say her team lost 20-37. No, coach, your team lost 37-20.

 

We have some varsity coaches do that.

 

A few years ago I had a mom on the phone for 30 minutes because we didn't have anything on her son scoring 1,000 career points. We had over 50 schools in our circulation area, and she couldn't understand how or why we didn't keep detailed scoring records on every player. Turns out, the school didn't know either, and she reamed them out too. Funny part of the story, she never referred to the kid as her son, but kept saying, "He's my DNA."

 

Several years ago, a guy called in to complain that one of the baseball players on the local MLB team was clearly on steroids because his stats had dropped like a rock and he was angry we hadn't written a story about it. He actually cited the stats as hard evidence of his steroid use and claimed that we were trying to cover for the team. So I asked him if another more beloved player on the team was also on steroids because his stats had fallen drastically too (to the point where eventually they cut him outright), and he got pissed and hung up on me.

It turns out the very next day we had a story about a different player's steroid abuse, so I wonder if that caller thought he was 100% responsible for the story being written.

 

OOP would have loved to have received that call.

 

One of the more recent emails about said player told us "Don't tell me that the coaches have to inform the papers. It's your job to know. Do it".

We're actually in a stretch where I believe we've had four or five 1,000 point scorers in a week's time. Must be the right time of year for milestones.

 

Well don't you know coaches meet up with reporters in parking garages at 2 am to tell them about their 1,000 point scorers?