beginning stringer problems

[Ace]

It's always a struggle. When you find someone good just treat 'em like gold.

or Fool's Gold

Or, in Mr. Hickling's case, like a nice, shiny cubic zirconia.

 

[ronalong]

Prospective football stringers at my old shop had to shadow me for a game before we'd set them free on their own assignment. Two stories:

-- Young female in college goes to game with me, we're on the sidelines. Big lineman is standing near us, shoes covered with tape. She says "wow, he's playing with two broken ankles?" That, in addition to having to explain the concept of downs, didn't earn her any future work.

-- Old fella follows me for a half, then asks if he can go home at halftime. Fine by me, he seemed to understand everything. Well, he went home and died.

You mean to tell me you won't use a dead stringer. Isn't that discrimination?

 

[sirvaliantbrown]

-- Old fella follows me for a half, then asks if he can go home at halftime. Fine by me, he seemed to understand everything. Well, he went home and died.

This cannot be a true story.

Is it a true story?

 

[playthrough]

-- Old fella follows me for a half, then asks if he can go home at halftime. Fine by me, he seemed to understand everything. Well, he went home and died.

This cannot be a true story.

Is it a true story?

Completely true. Sad story. In no way did I mean to make light of it, but it is one of those old tales from the shop that comes up from time to time. You can imagine the gallows humor that followed from the rest of the sports staff.

 

[steveu]

Never again will I use the phrase "you're killin me" in our newsroom.

 

[2underpar]

dude, you need to cover the dead guy's games, put his name on them, change his address to your home address and pay yourself a stringer fee on top of your regular pay.
As grady told fred sanford after he was hit by a white guy in a cadillac, -- you're sitting on a gold mine.

 

[sartrean]

dude, you need to cover the dead guy's games, put his name on them, change his address to your home address and pay yourself a stringer fee on top of your regular pay.
As grady told fred sanford after he was hit by a white guy in a cadillac, -- you're sitting on a gold mine.

Ha, I did that once.

I once worked as SE for this crazy freaking publisher. He was pretty liberal when it came to using stringers and paying them like $40 a pop for photos, so I used his camera and my friend's name and SSN to get paid. He had no idea, but he also had no idea of how to run a business, and I worked all the freaking time because I had to take photos of everything. the publisher never caught on.

The tax free cashola was nice, and this guy was a huge jerk to work for and had been ripping me off for a year, so I rationalized it by thinking he needed to be screwed.

 

[HejiraHenry]

We had a story turned in to us Friday night that might be the most ghastly mess I have ever seen.

I'll see if I can post a bit of it tomorrow, but I can tell you -- the score appeared nowhere in the damned thing.