Dear dimwit on the phone

Never give out a score. If they want it bad enough, they can go to the Web or buy a copy the next day.

 

Dear Calling on Friday Night During Football Season to Find Out A Score
I'm busy. Very busy. Scratch that. I'm busier than a condom machine at the Bunny Ranch. I've got a gamer to finish, a section to lay out and edit and I've got to write up a couple of capsules for good measure. Then the phone rings.

Me: Sports, Bamadog
Caller: What was the score in the Northeast Viagra vs. South Douchebag game?

Those calls take up far too much of my already slammed Friday night.

We run our scores up on the web site on the crawl. I'm not just sitting here waiting to give you the score about the South Shrivelcrotch vs. Northeast Dorksboro game. I'd like to go home before 3 a.m. after working a double-shift.

Either get on a computer like most of the modern world and look at our site. Scores are updated as soon as we get them. If not, you'll just have to wait until the morning when the paper arrives. If I give you the information free of charge, I'm assigning no value to our one commodity: information.

And that makes you a customer how? You're wasting my valuable time and browbeating me to give you something we charge everyone else money for. That money pays my rent, car note and other living expenses. Why don't you try working for free?

Sincerely,
Bamadog

 

An elderly woman once left a voice-mail message (and thus heard the "no one is available to take your call; please leave a message" spiel) that roughly went as follows:

"Hello ... I have a question. Who is the greatest Negro base-stealer ... in baseball?"

(lengthy pause)

"Hello? Hello?"

(frustrated sigh, then click)

 

Dear Ego Maniacal Parent:

We congratulate your son for being inducted into his college's hall of fame. However, we lost interest in writing about it when you mentioned that you moved two time zones away in 1984, and the last time your precious boy wonder set foot on a field here in our community he was in sixth grade and playing in the local rec league.

We have no doubt your friends who still live here will be interested in hearing this news. Feel free to send them an e-mail. Or a fax.

 

THIS!

I ended up being forced to run a picture of a kid who was a kicker at a university nowhere near here whose parents moved to Iowa or someplace like that 10 years before the kid was born just because one aunt lives here! And this was after I had already explained why not to the aunt. So she went over my head all the way to the publisher.

OK, fine, make me run it...but I get to decide how it runs. I took that picture, wrote a cutline about how this kid makes long field goals (50-plus yarders at an NAIA school; gotta admit that is effing good). And then gave it absolutely no context as to why it was running in the paper. The cutline basically said, "This kid has been breaking kicking records at Podunk Bible College this year. He also has a couple of career records."

Nobody said one word about it.

 

Dear PR Hack,
After four consecutive days of leaving messages for you and never getting a call back, please stuff your indignation up your ass when I finally catch you at your desk and you begrudgingly say you'll hook me up with the right vice president in charge of asshattery. When you've asked when my deadline is and I respond that it's tomorrow at noon, the only reason it's now a rush job is because you were too big of a fuckup to actually return my many calls in a timely manner. Consume feces and expire, you incompetent jerk.

Yours, respectfully,
Killick

 

Dear Incompetent SID type:
Please deposit the press release you sent two weeks ago hoping we could do a story about an initiative that won't happen for two weeks, and your follow up indignant e-mail, up the orifice of your choice.
Save room for your say nothing press release about an event happening Friday which was sent Thursday night at 9:15. You drunken hag.

 

Dear All-Star Basketball Camp director,
Stop sending mail that reads, "As we discussed on the phone this week..." when we didn't. Don't know you, never met you, and we'll be damned if we're going to promote your camp when you say we talked on the phone and didn't...

 

... and unless you can give me a date and place in our circulation area for your camp, it'll get dumped in the same file as the press releases on FieldTurf and "stories" from golf and fishing tour firms. But if you really want to get your camp in our paper, I can transfer you to any of our fine ad representatives just across the aisle who are eager to talk business!

 

And stop calling it a "public service announcement" for gosh sakes! You're just trying to get a free ad for your business. Go to the shop a couple towns over. For some reason, you seem to have luck getting it in there.

 

And you can tell your wife to call me anytime.

 

but only if she's proveably and demonstrably hot.