Dear dimwit on the phone

Does this game determine which Legion post gets home field advantage in the State Tournament? [/thistimeitcounts]

 

A voice mail left on Friday: "Hi this is (unintelligible name). I need to find out how to get something into the sports calendar, so call me." (Click.) Did not leave a return number. This happens more often than it should.

 

I have a voicemail system that doesn't give me the caller's number, and in my message I specifically say you need to leave some contact info for me to return you call. Yet maybe 10 percent of callers do so. I used to think it was just people who have become accustomed to using cell phones and even landline phones with caller ID, but it even seems to be the older people who call with questions that lead me to believe they have no access to the Internet, let alone a smart phone.

 

Oh, yeah, that was one of the worst. I am normally pretty good about returning calls to readers. But I guess about 65 percent of my voice mails left no contact information.

 

You don't leave a name or where I can reach you, don't get pissed off when I don't call you back.

 

What's funnier is, I put "to submit something for local sports announcements, send to ..." as part of my greeting, and people still leave messages asking how to get something in the announcements.

 

Yeah, I adjusted my voice mail to specifically tell people that A.) I'm not the person to contact for ad questions, B.) I'm not the person to contact for circulation questions and C.) I'm not the person to contact for our sister paper The Daily Times.

Out of every 10 messages I get, seven or eight of them are still in one of those three categories.

People don't listen ... and I don't forward messages.

 

I started working at one TV station about a year after it canceled a really long-running children's show and replaced it with a morning newscast. My phone extension was the old number they gave out to call for tickets to the show. Two or three times a week I'd get voice mail messages from moms looking for tickets -- and they'd almost always say "We never miss your show!"

 

Dear MMA fan: No, I don't know any more about the cops questioning the local fighter in a bar fight than what's on our website. You may find this to be a surprise, but we have a police reporter that handles that stuff.

 

Funny thing is, I think I know which fighter and the incident you're talking about. Gotta love it when fans call you in hopes of getting some scoop that won't be in the newspaper tomorrow.

 

Yep. I was off Friday when it broke, but the newsies told me it went viral quickly. They also knew where I stash all the wirephotos of him (no way we're paying Getty for that).

But we've all got them no matter where we work ... people who figure we must hold out a couple of details out of every story, just so we can tell them when they call. Uh, I've got this thing called a newspaper and another thing called a web page that people can read so they don't have to call me all the time! Oh, and don't ask me "what I think" of the whole thing. Local jock has brush with law I a) let the newsies handle it, that's their job; and b) consider it hands-off for any comment.

 

Oh, I have gotten calls from people wanting to know about an official's call in a game I never watched, or some boxing-related question, etc. The public seems to think that newspapers (1) know everything about everything, (2) watch every sporting event in the world and (3) have an army of reporters who work 24/7 and are eager to drop everything and fix your latest crisis..... or rescue your cat out of a tree.