Why I drink ... phone calls.

I've always thought newsrooms should have a ready room on weekends, like the sleeping quarters for interns at hospitals when they pull 36-hour shifts, just for those idiots who call at 10 p.m. on a Saturday wanting to fix their ad or put in a classified ad.

 

(bump) First round's on me after this week!

We've all done the "old guy gets named to hall of fame" interview, right? Did a couple like that last summer, one who was going into a fastpitch softball hall of fame, the other who said he'd played baseball at the local base with Bobby Thomson ("The Giants win the pennant!") during the war ... and he produced the box scores to prove it. Fine enough. Nice little features to beat the summer doldrums.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. Apparently someone is working on a book about the heyday of fastpitch and the first guy's all hot and bothered to get this area included. If he gets a bunch of guys together, can we send someone over to do a story so we can send it to the author of the book? Ignore it as long as possible ... not only are we in the midst of spring sports, we're also putting together the all-county team for winter. That, and, a) not really interested in it as a story until the book comes out, and b) if we're going to do the author's work for him, and we're not going to put it in the paper, then why should we give our work away?

So this week, editor e-mails me. Call this softball guy. So I call him and tell him we can't make it. Next day, another e-mail from the editor, a message from the guy, and an e-mail from the guy. Wants to know if we can help him record it. I suggest he see if the public library has recorders he can check out, or he get a cheap one at the department store.

Don't know what it is with some people, thinking our priorities should revolve around them. And with that, think I'll have another beer.

 

My personal favorite was from last fall during the HS playoffs, a guy calls and says he went to Bumblefuck HS, which is playing in the state softball semifinals, and he would like us to do a big feature story on the team.

The only problem was that Bumblefuck HS is probably 250 miles from us, and the people from Bumblefuck would have to drive 175 miles just to get to the closest place that sells our paper. And the state tournament is played a good 200 miles away from us, so you couldn't even do a story under the guise of "this is a really good team coming to play at state in our town".

I politely explained all this to him, several times, but he wouldn't budge. He went to Bumblefuck and he would like to read a story on their softball team, so he wanted us to do this story.

Finally I just lost my patience and said, "This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever heard in my life. You are the only person in this entire half of the state who cares at all about the Bumblefuck HS softball team. There are probably 10 million stories we would do before we would even get to the Bumblefuck HS softball team, and even when we got to them on that list, we would pass on the story. If this bothers you that much, then you need to move back to Bumblefuck and stop bothering us."

His response was about 5 seconds of silence, then "Uhhh, OK" and he hung up.

 

How about the ones that start with this: "Hey, I'm really good friends with (Editor, Publisher, Advertising Rep) and hope you can help get this publicity in the paper for us."

Throwing out the supposed friendship with someone higher up doesn't automatically mean it's a slam dunk.

 

Yep.

A few months ago, we get a submitted picture of one of our high school golfers who signed with a small college. The dad, who's a customer of one of our ad people, saw that we had ran a story on another athlete signing a D-I scholarship and demanded we do a story on his kid because he signed with a college.

Instead of coming to us, he went through his ad rep to get it done. Ad rep comes upstairs one day and says "I've got a story for you guys." We ask him what it is, and he shows us this picture of the golfer and says one of his customers would like us to do a story. We tell him we only write signing stories when an athlete signs with a D-I school.

The ad rep got pissed at us, and then went and told his customer we weren't going to run the story. The customer proceeds to email my boss, our M.E. and our publisher, demanding we write a story about his kid -- who isn't a bad golfer, BTW -- signing with this NAIA (IIRC) school because "You just ran a story on some other kid."

It was during the early signing period for football, and we had three kids going D-I. We ran three stories that week -- two on the same day, IIRC -- and this dad wanted us to do a story on his kid as well. My boss calmly explained our policy, that we don't do stories on any athlete who doesn't sign with a D-I school, and that the policy has been in place for almost 20 years. Boss told him we'd run the photo, and that if we ran the story, we'd have to run a story for every athlete in our area that signed with a college.

Dad still couldn't see it our way, and threatened to pull his advertising. Several months later, though, he still has an ad in the paper just about every day.

 

Woman just called the office, wanted to let us know that one of the drivers at our local dirt track would be having his bachelor party at the track's season opener tonight. Thought it would be nice to have a story with photos.

I can only imagine the photos we could have taken tonight.

 

Now, these are the kind of tips we can use.

 

I actually find it off-putting enough that sometimes, just for a minute, I don't want to do the story, no matter how good it is.

Then I give it an objective look and decide.

 

Guy calls the other day and asks if I'm the sports editor. Yep.

He then follows with a long, involved story about a guy from Nebraska who played ball "over your way" and could I find some clippings of him for the Hall of Fame induction is his hometown that's coming up. No, that stuff's probably at the library, I said ... but first, the name's not familiar, so where did he play?

He keeps mentioning Omaha – remember, I'm in Mississippi – and finally I say, "But where did he play ball here?" "In Omaha?" "No, here in Tupelo, Miss., where I am sitting. Here."

Long pause. "I thought I was calling the Omaha paper."

"Not exactly."

 

Remember the Giants/Vikings game that got moved to a Tuesday?

Guy calls in, I answer, "InsertPaperHere Sports."
Idiot: "What's going on with the Giants game?"
Me: "What?"
Idiot: "Why isn't it on?"
Me: "I don't know, I don't work for the cable company."
Idiot: "Well how do you write a story without watching the game?"
Me: "Um..."

You see where this is going... Cut to the end.

Me: "Well, you can follow it online."
Idiot: "I got my computer on, what do I do?"

More crap, blah, blah.

Me: "Well, It's on the radio."
Idiot: "That's no fun."
Me: "Sorry."

Dude was not pleased. He wanted ANSWERS. So I gave him one. Then he hung up.

Me: "Well, truthfully, I called the cable company and begged them to play regularly scheduled programming over the game because 1. I have that pull, and 2. I want to piss morons like you off." (edit: I replaced "people" with "morons like you" for effect in this thread, FYI.)

Have to love how people think we all have 86 televisions with 86 games playing at the same time, and we "cover" them all ourselves, and write the stories under all kinds of fake AP Writer bylines.

 

Dear softball coaches who call in their game results at 10 p.m. when the game ended at 6:30,

Fuck You.

 

This.