Dear dimwit on the phone

To the guy who was tweeting complaints our our website being down for an hour or so the other morning,

You realize it's free, right? You're outraged that a free product isn't available for two hours a week? And what's that? You think we must have had layoffs or are changing our website over to a PR site? Genius, really, and it's nice that it's coming from a guy who gets to see his team's recaps in print every time it plays.

What's funny, though, is that when I click the link to your blog, it's about 90 percent links to our stories, and your two sentences of commentary per link doesn't read to me like you're a big critic of ours any other time. Sorry we couldn't give your blog content for two hours that day. I'll send you a check out of my own account for the full refund price of free dollars and free cents, and I'll include as a bonus free content all day tomorrow and, heck, the rest of the week to make up for it. I'm really sorry you wasted all your free.

 

At one stio, one of our shooters took a mug shot for "Faces in the Crowd," so he added "work has appeared in Sports Illustrated" to his resume ...

 

That sounds just like my dad. He'll get mad at the local daily and drop his subscription. Then after a couple of weeks, he gets tired of driving to the corner store and buying a copy, and re-ups. It's pretty funny.

 

If you're posting the same stories for free on your website, why would s/he have to subscribe at all? Unless the site goes down regularly, like the one for MonsterLobster's paper. :

 

On my voicemail, a message from this morning: "Call me back, or I'll cancel my subscription."

So I call the guy. He first chews me out for calling him and interrupting him while he's watching a high school basketball game. "If you would have been in the office this morning, we could have dealt with this then." I explained that, by being a morning newspaper, no one is in our department until mid-afternoon, at which point I got a lecture about how someone should be in our office at all hours.

Then he gives his complaint — he thought the photo we ran today of a wrestler from the high school in his town getting pinned was "unsportsmanlike." When I asked why, he said, "It showed him getting beat, and that takes away from all of the hard work he's done." At that point, I told the guy to enjoy the rest of the game he was watching, and hung up.

 

You should have added that you only ran it because you enjoy costing kids scholarships.

 

Sweet! You mean I can say I worked for USA Today since they ran a volleyball pic of mine once?

 

Awesome. I was standing on the sideline during the play where Vince Young got hurt in 2008 and you can kinda see my legs. They aired that play over and over on ESPN that season. So does that mean I can list "Made frequent appearances on Sportscenter"?

 

"Very well sir. Are you willing to pay the overtime that it would require to have someone be in the office at all times?"

 

I got a similar call today too. The traditional "you're obviously biased against Podunk East soccer because Podunk West games are always in the paper and Podunk East's aren't."

If the woman had left a number, I would have explained that Podunk East has a long history of not sending in results, and that's despite the fact that the coach was sent snail mail with my card explaining how to call in at the beginning of the season, was handed another card when I covered their league opener, and, along with the rest of the coaches got a second copy of the preseason letter when I let the AD know what I was doing. But, go ahead, remain uninformed on why the paper does things, and stop functioning as a member of the community should you decide to cancel your paper.

 

Everyone should have "Time magazine's Person of the Year, 2006" in their awards/achievements section.

 

Click.