So did you REALLY get married?

Our latest new policy (not that it would affect sports often ):

We must now ask either the groom(-to-be), bride-(to-be), or one of the parents of, an engaged/married couple if they actually got engaged/married. Why? Because some woman brought in a fake engagement announcement to our sister paper a couple of months ago.

This is the somewhat logical followup to our policy that all obituaries/death notices must come directly from a funeral home, which was created after someone submitted a fake obituary to a different sister paper in order to try and get out of paying some sort of debt.

This led to the managing editor's end of a phone call today: "I have to ask you two questions, one of which is going to sound really dumb. It doesn't say when the wedding took place ... OK, then, and now I have to ask you if you're actually married ... Well, I said it would sound really dumb."

 

If someone would go to the trouble to bring in a fake engagement announcement, what would stop them from just lying about it when you call to ask them?

 

That's exactly what I was thinking.

If this is really a problem, the paper should include a "county of license" line on the form and then check it in whatever timeframe each county uses to post the record. Those announcements aren't all that time-sensitive anyway.

 

It was only a matter of time...

One paper I worked at would get fake obits faxed in pretty regularly.

 

Which is why we only take obits - and, most importantly, obit corrections - from funeral homes.

 

Actually, now that I think about it, the policy should probably be that you have to at least contact both the bride and the groom.

The incident that caused the policy to be created resulted from the fact that the guy who was named in the fake engagement announcement came into the office looking for some skulls to crack. I can't remember what the woman's motivation for placing the fake announcement was, though.

 

She wasn't good at saying no, so it was her way of telling him she didn't want to have sex.

 

Many years ago at another paper, there was a big to do over a birth announcement. Seems the couple wasn't married and the alleged paternal grandmother was insistent that her son was NOT the father of the child. I never heard the outcome of the situation, but it was just another example of why life in (extremely) small towns isn't always idyllic.

 

Well, we don't all plan to get married six or seven times.

 

Hi. I would like to report an death. The name of the deceased is Tom Sawyer.

My name? Ummmmm...... Tommy Sawyer.

 

Let the record show that when I got married in 1982, the "Times" called me at work to verify the details of our wedding annoucement.

 

I always feel like a creep for having to tell an elderly woman who brings in her husband's hand-written obit that we need it to be emailed or faxed ("Why don't you just send it over on a dinosaur?") from the funeral home. But people are pretty understanding when we explain the horror stories.