Dear dimwit on the phone

Getting back to the phone stuff, we have some fucking guy who calls in like 3 times per week asking if we know who's winning/leading the current PGA Tour event.

Mind you, I can't say for certain how old this guy is, but he sounds fairly young. It's not like he's screaming into the phone half-deaf or anything. When I simply look it up online (as this guy could do with his phone, as any other person in the world save maybe 105-year-olds has a smart phone now), he always gets all excited about who's winning and starts breaking it down.

If this guy is such a big golf fan, WHY IS HE CALLING US TO ASK WHO'S LEADING TOURNAMENTS! It's like breaking down Roger Federer's career and then calling the local weekly to ask who's winning at Indian Wells or something.

I always want to tell the guy: If you're such a big golf fan, why aren't you actually watching the tournaments? He's gotta just be lonely.

 

Got a text message from someone with a Los Angeles number (we're thousands of miles away from Los Angeles) offering to give me inside information on the coaching search for our local high school football team "for the right price," which he later says is "a small fee."
I'm almost too doubled over from laughter to text this guy back and tell him how insane he is.
He also greatly overestimates my net worth and how much I give a damn.

 

Thought you were only 15 minutes away ... in Tahoe.

 

So you were the dimwit on the other end of the phone.

 

We started a fun little poll about who our Twitter followers -- most of whom are high school kids -- think should be our boys basketball Player of the Year. At first, we did the poll through Twitter, with only four options. Some people mentioned that Johnny Smith and Billy Johnson also should be included, so we put the poll on our website.

Well, through three days, there has been 1,500 votes (which is A LOT for our site) and word is some parents are campaigning on FB for their kids. They have this belief that this poll will decide who gets the nod, which obviously is not the case. We had a few calls this morning asking how long the poll will run. Now I have to go back and inform everyone that this poll is for entertainment purposes only. Parents ruin everything.

Costing kids more scholarships, one internet poll at a time.

 

I may have shared this here before. Some 25 years ago we ran a daily phone-in poll where we would ask a question about something in the news and readers would call one number for yea and another for no. We were about 15K circulation and would get 50 to 200 calls per question.

We asked a question about something done by one of our county supervisors, who lived in our city. His daughter called to complain that she thought the question was unfair, but then apparently figured she could game the system and call herself and the numbers quickly flipped in his favor. We had one of our largest vote totals ever.

So it appears she and/or friends made hundreds of calls for a poll that didn't mean anything.

 

Wow...how about I'm sorry, how can I get better? What do I do in a situation like that next time?
God forbid the unqualified rookie try to learn anything.

 

Yes, in our area, the big metro paper is notorious for running social media polls that actually direct their editorial choices. "What game should we cover Friday night..." Ridiculous, but you do have to be careful about social media votes.

 

Angry wrestling grandmother (and mother) made their rounds screaming into a phone at about four different people in our newsroom, including myself, who should have been the only one needing to listen to her garbage. Anyway, she spews on and on about how her grandson is never in the paper, so I walk her through our last three editions which included a feature on the kid, Regional tourney coverage of the kid and state tourney coverage of the kid. Hmmm. That didn't stop her screaming, though.

I fear now the whole community will cancel their subscriptions...that was her threat anyway

 

The other one I got recently was an overly-excited dad, while I was waiting to talk with his son. Nice enough guy, but his comment was along the lines of 'Write them up big, we need to get these kids scholarships'

1) It's not my job to promote your kid
2) there's no amount of writing I could do that would dupe even a junior college coach into giving any of the players I saw on the small-school court a chance on their team.

Be excited, celebrate one of your kids' teams few wins on the year. But keep the expectations real. And if you are wanting a scholarship, get this fired up about your kid's homework or report card.

 

The trend now is for basketball scorekeepers to record names in their books with first initial and last name. That's ok when teams from the league we cover are playing, but when it's a non-league team you have to go searching for a roster for the first name of the kid who dropped 32 on the local team. But, the topper of all toppers is when a book lists the first name and an initial for the last name. SMH

 

Current news-side web stories: Local economic development, local teacher doing something cool, local teens putting together a cool program, awards for local volunteers, and a story about a guy busted for cocaine possession. Comment under that last one: "Why don't you guys ever report any positive news?"