Most tedious assignment EVER

Chair volleyball at an old folks' home, ca. 1994. The old women's laughing jaws looked like those of the old Charlie McCarthy dolls, like it was attached but still artificially movable. Or something. Forget the jiggling arms after each "parry."

That thoroughly miserable experience was the first thing on my mind at kickoff of my first NFL game.

 

I believe we have a winner!

 

Winter. 1993. The upper Midwest. I'm the cops and corpse reporter. Cold snap hits. Old people die. In one day, 24 obits come across my desk - averaging 17 inches apiece. Painfully rewritten from mortuary scribblings. In all, there was one typo - heard about the next day from my boss. He stopped talking when he saw the wristguards I was wearing for Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.

 

Covering a weekend long curling bonspiel. Love the sport, but watching it live is like watching paint dry. The hardest part is trying to stay awake.

 

Obits can be a bitch. During the weekends to help out our weekend reporters when they were overloaded, I'd offer to type the obits (while working lead on the desk). Some days it would be OK, but I remember pounding out 200 inches of obits one day. Needless to say, I quit volunteering to help after that.

 

Covering a darts tournament once because the editor of the paper was an avid darts player. Believe it or not, we're talking a paper with a circulation of more than 200,000. Never been in a smokier room in my life (and I spent three years doing Winston Cup races when they passed out cartons of cigarettes in the press box). I had to take two days off just for my lungs to recover. The sports editor apologized and gave me a raise.

 

I covered an arm-wrestling tournament held on a Sunday afternoon in a bar in Hillsboro, Texas.

 

Sirs, Madames,

I loved covering curling events, national and provincial. Great characters, none of them sober. How much does my life suck? Everything else must be pretty bad.

YHS, etc

 

I wrote a feature on the NY Rangers' Adam Hall. He was deadly, ladies and gentlemen. Deadly.