Dear dimwit on the phone

Sooooo, what kind of car were they?

 

Guy calling from neither Illinois nor Washington Sunday wanted to know who won the game between the Seahawks and the Cubs.

 

Ed Rooney: What's the score?
Pizza Joint Owner: Nothin' nothin'.
Ed Rooney: [not really listening] Who's winning?
Pizza Joint Owner: The Bears.

 

We got caller ID a few weeks ago.
We have started an "idiot list" already and are making numbers not to pick up!

JOY!

 

Tell him the Sonics beat the White Sox.

 

I've been doing that for a while now. The list is getting pretty damn big.

One lady calls all the time asking random questions about random teams. Once in a while she calls back to ask the exact same question even if someone answered her earlier. We're not sure if she has dementia or is just lonely. However, sometimes she asks questions that are so specific and detailed it's obvious she's watching the game and already knows the answer.

We also have one jerk who likes to call from the other side of the state to bother us with questions (perhaps the major newspaper near him stopped taking his calls?). If he gets the answer he's looking for, he hangs up without another word or even a thank you. If we don't have an answer for him, he swears, screams "F--- you!" and hangs up on us.

 

Honest

l

Makes all the sense in the world to me.

If I knew my wife/kid/etc. would have been in that area, I would have wanted to know what kind of car it was.

Not saying you had the info, but it makes sense to ask.

 

We have caller ID, but it only works on voicemails. I wish we could do this.

 

Yeah, I completely understand why someone would ask, and honestly the questions weren't stupid. I just feel sometimes people in this town want us to provide information they really don't need or they want to know something to prove a crazy conspiracy theory. We are a small town that and we are the worst players of telephone ever, so I am very weary of giving out too much.

For example, a guy is killed in an unincorporated area just outside of town. Body is eventually found buried in an out of the way spot near his home. But the way this town tells it, the guy was killed, stuffed into a mattress, driven halfway to the next town over and burned. I get calls all the time from people asking me to look into some cockamamie rumor that is going around that are wildly untrue.

 

Spartan: Understood. We all get incredibly frustrated sometimes, and the people out there just don't get it.

Like I said, I understand, I do not necessarily condone them.

 

This was something we used to run in the paper once a week, but week to week it was extremely inconsistent. One week there'd be room for maybe 8 announcements, the next week 40. Eventually it stopped running in the paper and is now online only, but it seems like the only people who see it online are the people who sent in announcements since it's practically a hidden page on the website with one tiny link I doubt anyone is looking for. There's also diminishing returns on it as the number of announcements submitted has dwindled down to pretty much just the people that have been used to submitting their stuff over and over again.

There was only one person who complained over and over again when it stopped running in the paper, and it happened to be one guy who would use it all the time to announce his pay camps. He claimed "community relevance" or something like that. I guess he thought he was entitled to free advertising for profit.

Back when it still ran in the paper, there was an old guy who called one time to make sure his announcement for roster spots available on his senior citizen softball team (not league, just his one team) was published again, even though it had already run a few times when most of the announcements would usually run once or twice at the most. I even told him about how many times it ran, but he wasn't having it. Naturally, I didn't run it anymore after that.