Phone Call of the Day – non sports

I had a guy call me this week on my cell phone, thinking I was the guy who installed a toilet in his house the day before.
"Sir, I'm not a plumber"
"Well, I know you ain't. You're the one that installed my toilet yesterday."
Took about 10 minutes to convince the guy I wasn't a half-assed plumber, but a half-assed editor instead. Meanwhile, the fool in the office next to me is shouting "Hey boss, where do you want me to put all that pipe and your plumbing tools?"

 

Hell, I owe that fool next to you a beer. That's some funny shit.

 

Good comeback by the guy, though.

 

I hope you told him, Bring it, motherfucker. I'll gun your gutless ass down as soon as you set foot on my property.

 

As a job-between-jobs, I once worked in the undergraduate housing office at a university. The parents of incoming freshmen are hilarious. Helicopter parents, indeed. My favorite call:

Mom calls up, starts making small talk about the dorm her kid has been assigned to. I answer her questions, can tell she's nervous but she's not getting to what's really bothering her.

Then she says her son has met his randomly assigned roommate, who seems nice and smart and all, but there's a problem.

It seems her son is about 5'5 and 100 lbs. soaking wet, while the roommate is about 6'5.

So her next question to me: are roommates required to bunk their beds?

No, I tell her, they can arrange the room however they want. Bunking helps with space but is not required.

She continues to fret about the bunking when she finally blurts out "But what if the roommate demands they bunk beds, and demands that he have the top bunk, and in the middle of the night the bed collapses and he falls on my son? He'll be crushed! He's too small! And if this big kid demands to bunk the beds, there's no way my son can refuse! He's too small!"

Miraculously I refrained from busting out laughing but did everything I could to reassure the mom that her son would not be crushed by a 6'5 guy in a bunk bed.

Then she got angry. This bigger kid, she said, would take up more space. The rooms were small, and this kid would obviously have bigger stuff, bigger shoes, all his bigger clothes may not fit in his closet so he might take over her smaller son's closet and how is that fair? Not only that, but his bigger legs, bigger arms and bigger feet would take up more physical presence in the room, how could anyone expect to be roommates with a 6'5 guy in a dorm room? because he was just going to take up too much space.

Exactly the reason why, she said, her son needed a private dorm room. And if I didn't assign her kid to one, she was going to call the vice president.

Ah, so that's what this is about. Your spoiled brat wants his own room. Gotta love parents.

 

My favourite recent phone call was from the nimrod who took issue with a headline on our front page which proclaimed, at the end of a lengthy criminal trial, that the defendant had been found not guilty.

The caller insisted that just because the guy was acquitted didn't mean he wasn't guilty. I kept trying to politely explain to him that an acquittal and a finding of not guilty are indeed the same thing. Finally he said he would be complaining to the publisher and would also contact the provincial press council to complain about my unprofessionalism in not only printing the headline (for which I wasn't actually responsible) but also for failing to agree with his assertion. :-\

 

Ever talked with the attorneys who represent idiots like that? It's some fun shit.

Some dumbass a few days ago tried to tell me the law states that once a company puts something on someone's property or inside someone's house, that person owns it. So I guess anyone who's ever bought anything online or through the mail owns whatever they received, no questions asked.

This guy was the very definition of fucktard. Unfortunately, he did find a way to get transferred to the legal department, where he continued his moronic argument fruitlessly for some time.

 

The publisher was out of town but everyone told me to tell him he could talk to our corporate owners if he had a problem with the article. By the end of the conversation, he was saying what a great writer I was and that he really respected me as a person. It was one weird conversation.

 

Did he find you yet?

 

Some people just call to argue.

I had a guy who wanted to know why we didn't run a certain story in the paper. We did, so I pointed it out to him.

It was an AP story, and he wanted to know why they didn't put in a certain fact. I explained to him that we were on deadline, and printed the first version which the fact was in.

Then he wantes to know why the AP writer didn't put the info in. Kept arguing that it was a really important fact -- as if I'm the AP writer.

 

One night back in college, I'm lounging in the dorm room watching TV around 10 p.m. when the phone rings. Guy asks "Is this Smithers welding hats and caps?" I say no, it's a dorm room at State U., and the guy has the wrong number.
He hangs up, and a few minutes later the phone rings again. Same guy, same question, except this time he's a little more insistent that he has the welding company. I tell him he's wrong again, and hang up. Few minutes later, same thing happens.
A few minutes after that, the phone rings again. I just know it's this fucktard, so I answer the phone "Smithers welding hats and caps." He starts going into detail about some piece of equipment he needs, and I quickly realize I can't carry on this conversation. So I tell him I'm just a night watchman, and he'll have to call back during the day.
Sure enough, a day or two later he calls back again. Tired of this nonsense, I tell him he's called a dorm room again. This time, he must have bought it because he didn't call back.

 

We had a woman call up one night, said she saw the moon explode. She looked up, and it was gone. Uh-huh.

Then, when we were still an afternoon paper, I was in the office one night about 1 a.m. writing a gamer when a elderly woman called and wondered why there wasn't an ad from one of the grocery stores in that day's paper. I told her no one was in that department. She then says, "I'll try back in an hour." I don't know if she ever called back.