Dear dimwit on the phone

Pardon the news side, but:

No, Mr. Soup Kitchen Director, we're not going to do another story on how you need more donations because "last week's was on page seven and you could do another one that goes in the front of the paper, because that gets us more donations."

Oh, and not to mention the publisher runs -- for free -- a 2x2 ad for your soup kitchen every week.

Maybe you could go drum up donations yourself?

 

YOU....



....BASTARDS!

 

NO SOUP FOR YOU!

 

Actually, that's one of the things the dad said - he asked if I had a kid who went to the school (insulting because I'm 30) or had relatives there.

 

He's got you figured out.

The last time I worked at a paper with a really serious preps section, there were six of us covering about 15 schools, and out of the six, only one grew up within 100 miles of the town, and he went to a high school that was on the very fringe of our coverage area. We'd get e-mails and calls at least once a week, usually more often, about how we were all *obviously* allegiant to some bumfuck school or another.

It's hilarious how universal that kind of complaint is.

 

I prefer that to the shit I got when I started my news gig last year. Without fail, at least once a week some jackass would drop a "Well, you didn't grow up in this town so you don't get it..." type of line.

Yes, sir, you're right. I didn't grow up here. As such, I don't "get" how important it is that I stop running our bi-monthly columnist because you disagree with his point of view. And, yes, ma'am, I'm sure my growing up in "the city" is the reason I don't understand how important it is to run the picture of your grandson being one of 200 kids chosen to go to the AAA ballpark as part of a reading challenge on the front page.

You can both choke on d*cks and have a nice day.

 

To be fair though, your town is full of fucking insane people. They are very into Democrats, but if you even mention wind turbines, they fly into a desperate, craven rage.

 

I used to get that at the small-town papers I worked for. My response was that if they needed a native who understood their town, then why did they have to keep hiring people from out of town?

They didn't like that so much.

 

One place I worked, we got so tired of "you favor Podunk Tech over Podunk all the time" that we decided, after deadline, we'd tell the next caller who said that, "You're right ... we hate Podunk High, and your kid. We hate Podunk Tech too. In fact, the only school we give a shit about in this county is Cowtown East!" Been a couple of times I've been tempted too, when a mom or grandma goes on and on about how hard their fawn tries, how he/she was screwed when they split the district 10 years before she entered school and had to go to Podunk Tech and yadda yadda yadda.

@Rickstain: Then there's the organizers of softball tournaments, who love to bitch because there was one little mistake and their item needs to be run again, and not buried in the announcements, or who think that theirs will be run separately, even though it's a couple of days late, because they're local or they didn't know the deadline. One stop, they went all the way up to the ME to complain, who dispatched them with one question: "How much did you pay for your announcement?"

 

A reader's facebook comment on an SE's page when he opened a can of worms apologized for not covering JV sports because of lack of manpower, space, and time:

"I total understand why you can't cover JV sports, but the kids that are on JV teams need some credit also. They work just as hard as Varsity teams and I believe they should at least have their scores in the paper. I know our home town paper, Podunk chronicle, is guilty of this also."

Oh, I went off on this chicka...it felt good, especially since it's not my newspaper. It always feels good when people agree with me and not her as well.

 

You know now that you have covered the public school, the Catholic school parents will be all over, right?

 

A new one this morning in voice mail.

A very nasty caller ... and, mind you, the nasty ones are 99 times out of 100 female – complained that her team was on the front paqe.

Yep, they lost. "You should have more concern about your local teams." And, what, leave them out?

"Her team" was going in that front page hole regardless of what happened, because we were shooting the game. It's the team's fault that it lost, not ours.