Dear dimwit on the phone

Depending on the state, it maybe wouldn't be stretching the coverage area that much farther....just realized our coverage area wouldn't fit inside of Rhode Island or Delaware.

 

It's not just more fun, I'm sure it's the truth. It is for most coaches I deal with. Love the schools that have younger assistants who are usually better at that stuff.

 

Caller: I have a question about an article you wrote about the Podunk police. You said they are supposed to get all that money from the sales tax increase (which passed in November and collections haven't started yet), but all they did was hire one guy and promote a bunch of others.

Me: The plan is to hire more, but there is a process. Officers aren't immediately available.

Caller: He's probably someone's relative.

Me: No, he comes from another department.

Caller: You sure about that?

If I was quicker I would have said, yes, he is someone's relative. Everybody is somebody's relative

 

Well, technically....caller's not completely wrong. Kinda. Sort of.

 

Or, maybe caller is wrong. Cop just appeared in a puff of a flash-bang grenade smoke for all we know.

 

We're changing our pages for comics, puzzles, and advice columns. The chain will have all papers use the same two-page spread. It saves on costs as the chain can get lower rates than having each paper do its own pages with different comics. It also means we lose some and gain some. The ME has written his column, and we have set up an email and phone line for complaints.

We listen to the voicemails each day, and I die a little inside with each whining call. The only reason it concerns me is that as design chief I'm responsible for the odds and ends that get into print but people don't think about (obits, event calendar, weather map, lots of other stuff). Maybe this is the kind of work I should be doing for free?

 

I don't know why we're still running all those things unless we've got a package deal with the mothership. I can only think a serial comic like "Alley Oop" baffles our readers when they only see the Wednesday and Saturday strips.

 

To say nothing of the thousands waiting to see if Mary Worth's going to get the abortion.

 

Saturday's best "Don't Change the Comics" hotline messages...

"Some of these new comics are SICK!"

"These new comics are not contemporaries of someone like Walt Disney."

"I also want to say that I don't like how I seem to never get my Monday paper."
(We dropped the Monday edition back in August.)

 

Don't you just love getting scoresheet photos that look like they were taken in a closet with the door closed? Or how about scoresheets (talking basketball) in which nothing is totaled for the players or teams! Or online rosters that list the players' names, class, position but no jersey #s? or the football coach who reports 13 completions for his quarterback, but the total player receptions add up to 11? A colleague years ago told me about a football team that reported impressive rushing totals every week, but they were constantly getting drubbed every week. He went to the school to visit the statisticians. Ends up the team ran the I-formation and the stat crew credited the tailbacks yardage from where they lined up in the formation!!!

 

I think I've dealt with each of those multiple times each, most recently coming last night. It was a good thing it was slow at the sports desk at the time. Sometimes if I'm rushing through mistotaled stats, I don't even stop to figure them out. But this time, the error was plain as day. A player made seven field goals for 14 points.....but two of the FGs were 3-pointers. I knew that couldn't be right. So it took me a while to figure out how to fix the error. The totals all added up right, except for that player. Finally I just deducted one FG from the player and moved on.

We have one school that is notorious for only having the jersey numbers and last names of each player on the stat sheet they send us. In most cases that's fine, only this school has three players on the roster with that last name. So we have to pull up the online roster to figure out which kid goes with which jersey number. Multiply that by two, since both the BBB and GBB teams for that school have the same problem, all the way down to the same family name.

 

This happens to me probably 4-5 times a night. It's infuriating, it really is. The amount of time I've wasted trying to figure out mistakes in boxes, inaccurate names, stats with player numbers but no names, unreadable scanned garbage, point totals that don't add up, coaches saying "unassigned" to an opposing player who scored 35 points (a side note, I'm always AMAZED at how fucking little some coaches know about other star players in the area, as if they haven't scouted or watched one second of film, or ever read anything, ever) has nearly driven me crazy.

Definitely driven me to drink.

We have so many high schools, plus two colleges we cover extensively, and we're so under-staffed, I just dispense with the garbage now. Seriously. Fuck it. If you're not competent enough to submit a box score, I'll just glean the small details I can and let 'er rip. If I can't even glean ANY details, or it takes a monumental effort that wastes my time, I just put the score in and say "no other details were available by press time." I'd assume we're all too busy and overworked now to be chasing after that shit anymore.

I try to keep season stats every year for football and boys and girls hoops, cause it's nice to have the records, but every year it gets harder. Thankfully there are enough websites around to fill in the blanks.