Crazy things you've had to do to file a story

Leader in the clubhouse. 8)

 

Not as compelling as above, but ...
High school basketball star Don MacLean was going to announce his college choice during lunch in the gym at Simi Valley High. My paper was a PM, so I had a chance to get in today's news today.
I pre-wrote a story saying he was going to UCLA. When he made his announcement, I was go call in a couple of quotes, office could adjust as necessary. If he announced a different choice, the lede would be tweaked, but most of the rest of the story would still be OK.
This was before cell phones.
I got to Simi Valley early to check out the area and found a pay phone near the the parking lot not far from the gym. Perfect.
So I go into the gym. Lunch bell rings, a lot of students show up. MacLean arrives. He makes his announcement that he is going to UCLA. I get a couple more quotes then head out for the pay phone.
DAMMIT, lunch time, there are about 25 girls lined up to use the phone.
I walked up to the girls who was next in line.
I said, "Please, I work for a newspaper and I have to make a 2-minute call. It's urgent. If you let me cut in, I will pay for all of your phone calls."
She said OK and that's what happened. If I remember right, if you make a credit card call, if you punch * or # you could dial another number without having to put in the credit card number again.
Worked out well.

 

About 2 years ago I find myself covering a Class C basketball playoff game in Louisiana. This school was about 30 miles from anything resembling civilization....the road leading to it wasn't even paved for the last 5 miles or so and 9 of the 12 the kids on the team had the same last name. We're talking serious backwoods stuff here.

I get there, no internet at the gym. I don't expect there to be wi-fi, but they don't even have a wall jack. I had a wireless card but we're so deep in the woods it can't find a signal. At halftime I convinced the principal to let me into the main office to use the internet there. She won't let me disconnect the office computer to connect my laptop, but I can use the desktop in there. Cool.

Game ends, I get my interviews and book it to the main office, write the story into the desktop, and pull up my email. Won't open. And it's not just my office email portal either. Yahoo Mail doesn't work. Gmail doesn't work. Facebook doesn't work. School has some serious filters on their internet. My newspaper's website does work, so I try to submit the story to one of the message boards. But that particular feature is also blocked by the filter.

No problem, I figure. I'll just call in and dictate. Except my cell phone apparently died at some point during the game. The school's office has a phone, but it either doesn't work or I can't figure out how to work it.

I end up taking my point and shoot and taking pictures of my story up on the computer screen, then plugging the memory card in my laptop. Then I got in the car and hauled ass. It's 20 miles to the nearest McDonald's. Finally I make it to the McDonald's about 5 minutes from deadline. Thankfully the wi-fi there works. I send the jpegs of my story from the laptop to my office. Thankfully one of the copy desk guys was a genius typist. He retyped the whole 20 inch story into the system, straight onto the page, and sent the page without proofing. We made it one minute early.

 

In the early 80s, I was covering a Christmas party in Savannah for Town & Country.....

 

I can't remember what led me to the situation I'm about to describe, unfortunately. This was many years ago, before wifi and before everyone had a cell phone. I was covering the tennis tournament in Indian Wells, Calif., and I think I tried but failed to send my story from my hotel room. (I often seemed to run into problems like that, especially in situations when you had to dial 8 or 9 before calling an outside number. My work-issued laptops never seemed to like that.)

Anyway, I was driving around Indio, I believe, and I somehow wound up at a small, dingy convenience store. I think I explained my situation to the owner or manager or whoever was running the store -- an immigrant from South Asia, who probably didn't fully understand the concept of filing a story remotely -- and asked if I could use a phone line. For whatever reason, he agreed, although I think he thought I just wanted to make a phone call. He led me through a small door, which opened not into another part of the store or an office, as I was expecting, but into his home. There were maybe five or six other members of his family -- wife, kids, grandparents -- clustered around a television in a small, dingy living room. They lived at the convenience store, basically. I'll never forget that. The owner showed my where the phone jack was, and I sent my story without a hitch. But I vividly remember being on my hands and knees, hooking up my computer and the phone line, while an entire immigrant family watched me, a stranger in their home. I tried to thank them profusely, but I'm not sure how much they understood.

 

My paper was just transitioning away from those when I got started in "the biz." Somehow I wound up with one in the trunk of my car, but I would almost always be able to check out a TRS-80 from the pool. The trouble with those (the TRS-80s) was the coupler ... you'd put these cups over the ends of the phone headpiece, but they'd go bad on you in a skinny minute. And since this was before all phones had modular connections, you weren't guaranteed to be able to make a direct connection.

Once I covered a high school basketball playoff game and found 'nary a phone that I could make work ... I wound up in a convenience store parking lot, retyping my story on that TI set the hood of my car. I could make it work with the payphone there.

My ultimate TRS-80 horror story involved the modular coupler and it shorting out my unit while I was trying to file a 60-inch monster feature for Sunday's paper. The unit still worked, but its memory had been purged. This was Saturday afternoon from the PGA Championship, and I wound up having to retype the whole thing from memory. Then I had to hustle like hell to get my regular coverage in. The same thing happened after Sunday's final round (and playoff). When I finally got everything in, I walked outside of the pressroom and chucked that coupler into a nearby water hazard. Such a satisfying gurgle as it slipped into the deep ...

 

Not very adventurous, since I only had to walk an extra 20 feet, but more one for the "technological mishaps" department.
Covering the College World Series a few years ago, right about the time wireless internet became the standard -- except our work laptop was still dial-up. It wasn't a problem most places, but the Rosenblatt Stadium pressbox had gone entirely wireless. Luckily, they still had a fax machine. I spent the few days I was there writing stories at my seat, then picking up the laptop and trudging into the NCAA PR people's workroom to send my story.
I felt like the uncool kid at the party. Luckily, the experience allowed me to convince the higher-ups that we needed to upgrade our laptops.

 

I remember how finicky those Trash-80 couplers could be. My most memorable filing episode came after a HS basketball game on the road, middle of nowhere. I mean, I passed the boondocks about halfway there.

After the game, all the school's offices are locked up tight because it's snowing like a bitch and everybody wants to get home. I found a pay phone (in the days before cellphones, newbies) at a closed convenience store and hooked up my Trash-80 to file. Of course the light in the phone booth won't work, so I have to leave my headlights on so I can see.

Amazingly, the story goes through the first time. I pack up and head back up the snow-covered highway. About this time an SUV passes me and immediately goes into a 360 spin about 50 yards ahead of me. Guy is unhurt, and I give him a lift up the road because he's local and knows there's a service station that will send a wrecker and pull him out of the ditch.

After I drop him off, and pull into a motel and stay the night. I'm only 60 miles from home, but I'm going like 15 mph in the snow.

Nobody even dared to question me about the motel stay when I filed my expense report.

 

Can you really call yourself a sportswriter if you haven't had to file using a Trash-80 trying to get one of 10 convenience store pay phones to hook up with the office computer?

 

Convenience stores, pay phone in the middle of the street, ripping out phone lines in hotel room walls and splicing, taking apart phones to splice wires, finding the fax machine's single line because the multi-line phone wouldn't work, and hitting the wrong button on the Trash 80 about the time you realize you hit the wrong button and everything goes "poof."

I dug a brown paper sack out of a trash bin once to take notes when I happened to get a state official on the phone, in one of those Hail Mary calls.

 

I had forrgotten about those $#%@#^# acoustic couplers. And, of course, there were telecopier days when you would send a page on 4 minutes and the guy at the other end would tell you the page was split and you had to send it again.

 

And most of the rubber couplers were round right about the time the phone companies started making the handsets square. That was fun.