Dear dimwit on the phone

I loved getting those calls when the D-I women's basketball team we covered was decent, and the fans thinking we were horrible because we "cut out" the latest line for women's basketball every day.

 

Here's another one. Not sure how long ago this was, but it wasn't even about the Winter Olympics. This guy was wrong about it not being in the paper, but he must've been expecting a big front page centerpiece or something:

 

This was in today's email, apparently from someone in the United Kingdom:

It sounds this person expects me to head out to the next rattlesnake roundup and free all the innocent little darlins. I'll probably just go cover whichever basketball/baseball/softball/soccer/swimming/track/tennis/golf event is on my schedule. I guess I have no compassion and lead a miserable life.

 

We had a caller who was upset that we weren't running any minor league baseball lines.

 

My God. I've had my moments where I thought I was a hopeless degenerate gambler. But never reached a low as low as betting minor-league baseball.

Used to work with a guy who would bet NHL exhibition games, though. Watching his decline was, um, interesting.

 

"They tried hard! You're mean for showing sad girls!!!"

 

I read that as linescores.

 

Me too. Anyone betting on minor-league sports has some issues.

 

No, since the topic of discussion was the Glantz-Culver Line, the caller was indeed wanting to know where the minor league baseball betting lines were. However, I don't think he was a degenerate gambler as much as a total idiot because he used to call all the time asking about stupid stuff. One time he called just to tell me something was on sale at a drug store chain.

 

Call No. 1: Mom calls in, asks why we haven't run a picture of her senior daughter or the other senior girl on the team.
Me: The photographers select what they choose to give us for publication.
Her: So do they not work for the paper?
Me: No, they do. They just choose the shots to run in the paper.
Her: Well, can you ask them to shoot my daughter?
Me: No, I don't tell them who to shoot unless it's a feature story, just like they don't tell me who to talk to or what to write.
Her: It would be nice. There are only two home games left. Thanks.

Call No. 2: How come we don't have any NASCAR coverage in the paper? Haven't had any in a while.
Me: Well, the season begins tomorrow at the Daytona 500. We have an entire page dedicated to it.
Him: But how come we haven't seen results?
Me: We typically only run the Sprint Cup and Nationwide race results.
Him: They had Daytona qualifying races on Thursday. Those weren't in the paper.
Me: To my knowledge, and I've been here five years, we've never run those. We run the start lists for Daytona and the Chase races from what I remember.
Him: Well, we'll so how you do this year.

 

I'm mildly surprised that you would not run the results of the pole qualifying and of the two qualifying races.

 

I was about to post the same thing but don't know the paper's situation. And saying they only run Daytona and Chase race lineups made me rethink it. Seems they don't care an awful lot about NASCAR. But if you run a Daytona lineup, I would think you would run the Duels results, since they set the field.