Dear dimwit on the phone

Good thing I live by myself because I. Just. SCREAMED.

 

This, except replace all references to football with "basketball" and replace the part about the combine with "I don't care that former North Carolina players sich as Vince Carter and Jerry Stackhouse attended your camp because while you do hold several camps in North Carolina, I still think your announcement is misleading because the camp you want me to plug is in Atchison, Kansas, which is still over 120 miles away from where I am."

 

Dear ederly reader,
Newspapers have deadlines. If something ends after our deadline, it isn't in the paper, hence the statement on the front page that says 'Such and such game ended after our deadline, the story is online at www.podunkpress.com'. It's 2010, there is no excuse for not having the internet. If you don't have it, every library in every town for 100 miles has it, go there and look.
This internet thing is not the way of the future, it is the way of the present. Get on board, or keep preparing for death.
Thank you for reading.

 

That's why all these get trashed immediately. They're so vaguely worded and don't list if they're doing anything locally, they should really be in the classifieds next to those "cruise ships are hiring" ads.

 

Dear baseball parent:

In communities that have split youth leagues, all-star teams can be split into American and National teams -- usually based on geography. American and National is a designation, not a nickname, so that's why I took the "s" off of your "Bumblefuck Nationals" team picture.

Sincerely,
I swear we had this very same conversation last summer

 

Awesome.

 

This reminds me of how sometimes we get obits that list survivors and then we get bitched at from the other side of the family, because they weren't included. I'm sorry if Uncle Shitdick didn't include you. It's not my battle to fight.

 

Even with an obit, I can understand people getting upset if one side of the family decides not to include the other side among the survivors, even though it's essentially the same thing.

I still remember the fishing photo incident from my one-man staff days. Guy brought in photo, with the ID and all that, and we ran it. Next day, my boss hands me a message saying that the kid's mom called and said the info wasn't accurate. I call the mom, and she starts going off on how "He's not a Jones. He's a Smith!" and wanted me to rerun the photo with the name Johnny Smith instead of Johnny Jones. I went to my boss, who told me to call the dad, who insisted the kid's name was Johnny Jones.

After several calls, and a bunch of wasted time, my boss finally got fed up and told me to call the mom back and say that there would be no correction or rerun. The mom got all POed, naturally.

 

This type of thing happens from time to time when reporting on kids. In this case and the obit, there is not much you can do. But if you are ever interviewing a high school kid or younger and you get into the family and there is a divorce, it can be a land mine.

So keep your radar up. You don't want to write a story about Little Junior who learned all he knew about football from his mom who raised him and find out that Divorced Dad was the kid's football coach for 10 years.

 

When I assumed the current position, was told to make sure to call a player by a certain name, or risk the wrath of one side or the other in a divorce. So I did. Kid took me off the hook at his scholarship newser, when the first thing he told me was, I'm 18 now, I want to go by _____ .

 

When I assumed the current position, was told to make sure to call a player by a certain name, or risk the wrath of one side or the other in a divorce. So I did. Kid took me off the hook at his scholarship newser, when the first thing he told me was, I'm 18 now, I want to go by _____ .
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Huh, huh, "Assumed the current position." Huh, huh.

I know, I'm real mature.

 

We had something like this get ugly. We had two local teenage girls killed in a drunk-driving incident. One was adopted by a foster family (her legal family), so through the funeral home, they submitted an obit. We ran it, no problem. Just happens her birth family lived in the area, and came in and insisted on running their own monster obit (we charge by the inch). Like an idiot, the greed-heads in the department take the money without thinking things through. We run the obit from the birth parents and all hell breaks loose. Lawyers calling, crying mothers, dad's threatening to kick the editor's ass. Apparently the birth mother took the obit and stuck it in the face of the adopted mother at the funeral - nice, classy stuff.

Adopted family is talking lawsuit, until the editor calms them down by making a donation to her memorial fund. I told management this would happen one day, one of the few times I wished I was wrong. We finally decided to only accept obits from the funeral home.