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

Covering a first-round playoff game. Our paper has the Saturday sports with the other paper in town providing the other sections so I have to file by 11. Only the baseball game heads into extra innings.. 8... 9... now in the 10th.
Closest phone line is at the school a quarter mile away... Assistant principal isn't leaving to go back to the school with me. So she hands me her keys and tells me where the fax line in the main office is. Stringer for the other paper says he'll tell me what's going on.
Visiting team takes a 4 run lead before I head to the school, so I wrote that and crossed my fingers. By the time I got to school and in the office, it's two outs, two on... home team makes third out, he tells me to send and I do, only four minutes late... connecting to AOL had never been better...
Jake has earned several beers for that over time...

 

Wild playoff night with multiple stories due...including a freelance gig with an earlier deadline than I was used to. Out of town tourney before wi-fi, so my plan is to quickly drive the 45 minutes home (halfway to our office) and send the freelance piece from there. Would have worked fine had schedules held true, but of course the tourney runs about two hours late, and I'm in trouble. Have to hit the freelance deadline AND my own deadline a bit later.

So I jump in the car, and call my wife to dictate it over the phone while driving. So there I am...dome light on, notepad in one hand, phone under my chin, driving (carelessly) with my other hand. And sure enough I get pulled over. Luckily, the cop let me off with a warning. I pulled into a nearby truck stop and finished trasmitting it with my wife, who fired off the email to the freelance people.

Ended up about 10 minutes past my own deadline that night, but it could have turned out much, much worse.

 

"Among other things"?! Was she taking a dump when you walked in? "Clicking the mouse"? This story needs more info methinks! LOL

 

I got pulled over returning from a statewide track meet (at which I had to climb the fence to get out after staying too long typing agate, as I didn't notice everyone had left). I had just been put on probation by the state for too many points on my driving record. I essentially begged the officer not to give me a ticket, to which he replied, "Son, I've seen your record, this ain't your first rodeo." I was given the ticket, which prompted a yearlong suspension of my driver's license and, for all intents and purposes, ended my career as a writer and led to my career as a desker.

 

I know where you live, asshole.

Actually, it wasn't as comfortable as the picture portrays.

 

Why would he get fired for missing deadline for something that wasn't really his fault?

 

Suprised you didn't cut the chord.

My first clip ever was off a phone dictation to Yuma. Shit, it could have been the Criminals. Head coach cried when I talked to him. Needless to say, that was fun.

 

Doodah is back!!!

Anyway, covering two high school basketball games and my work laptop just kept giving me a fatal error. Couldn't do anything. Had to write both the boys and girls gamers in one of the assistant coach's classroom. Didn't have anytime to go back to the office to write both. Embarrassing to ask, but at least the team won so he was in a good mood. Gotta do what ya gotta do.

 

That's the AP is for.

 

Nope. Just you, apparently.

 

Was covering a girls basketball region tourney game a few years ago (in 2007, IIRC) about 2 1/2 hours from the office. The game started at 7 our time and ended about 9:15 or so, and our deadline is 11:45.

I had one of our laptops with me and was all set in the hospitality room. Had my story done, dinner ate thanks to the nice folks at the school and was ready to send everything in.

Except the wireless didn't work like the school's AD said it would. The password didn't work or something. No problem, I say. I've got a flash drive handy and the teacher who was running the hospitality room left her computer on for me just in case something happened. It was almost 10:45 when I sat down at her desk.

I log on to the net and try to go to my Hotmail account (which I still use to this day, thank you very much), except the school has that site blocked. So I try MySpace and Facebook, but both of those are blocked as well. My last resort was yahoo, which also was blocked.

It was 11:15, and I was running out of time. [/jackbauer] I had no clue what to do, and I couldn't find anyone to help me. I even tried walking down to the office, but no one was in there. I was gonna miss deadline on a night when I had plenty of time to get my story filed.

And then it dawned on me: Try SJ. I pull up the site, and it's thankfully not blocked. I send my coworker, CentralKYKid, a PM and call him a few seconds later.

Him: Podunk Press, this is CentralKYKid.
Me: Check your PM's on SJ.
Him: Huh?
Me: Just do it. I couldn't email my story in because they've got everything blocked down here. So I sent it to you through SJ.
Him: Hang on ... how'd you think of that?
Me: Like I said, everything else was blocked. That was the last thing I tried.

It was 11:30. Had 15 minutes to spare.

 

And then there's this one:

Covering the state track meet one year in Lexington with one of our former writers. We got our stories written in plenty of time and were set to send everything in.

Only the phone lines the school had in the locker room didn't work. And the only other person left was the football coach, who didn't have his keys to the school so we could go inside and send from there. He only had keys to the locker room on him.

So my coworker calls a friend of his who lives about 20 minutes from where we are. It's 10:30 and our deadline is 11:30 on this night. We get in my car and drive to the friend's house, where we spend the next hour-plus re-typing both of our stories and agate. Neither one of us brought a flash drive, so we had to retype the stories on two computers.

The friend helped us get them done, and we filed at midnight. That was one of the longest days of my working life.