Where are the damn race results!?

Without fail, I get this guy who calls in and asks how the Braves did the night before if they are on the west coast. The score is too late to get into the daily paper, sooooooooo he calls Expendable at the Bumblefuck Times-Regress the next day. Makes perfect sense to me. At least I now have the Braves' page bookmarked to save time.

 

1, This summer, a women called my old shop each day to see when the Braves were on -- and she was calling us from the Gulf Coast, hundreds of miles away, on her cell phone.

2, The Sarcastic Old Guy is still calling my new shop, where I worked for about four years before wandering away briefly. And damn that bastard, he's almost always right about whatever he's calling for. In a couple of dozen calls over 3-4 years, I only caught him having missed seeing something once.

 

A favorite of mine from the current shop (taken from a colleague's blog):

Me: "Sports.”
Caller: “"Hey, I just wanted to know why the Giant’s jersey’s were spelled wrong yesterday?"
Me: "Spelled wrong? You mean the names on the back?”
Caller: "No across the chest. It had an extra E and G in it."
Me: "Sir, that said Gigantes. It’s Giants in Spanish.”
Caller: “Oh, why would they do that?"
Me: "Because many of the players and fan base are Latino."                             
Caller: “Well that’s stupid. They’re an American team; they should use their American name.”                                             
Me: “Who were they playing again?”           
Caller: “The Padres.”                 
Me: “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

Reader ignorance NEVER ceases to amaze ...

 

these are all priceless, but you know what I'd like to hear?

Everyone's best "I didn't get my paper tonight" story.

 

Back at one of my early stops, the ME was taking a turn on the city desk one night filling in for a vacationing editor. (OK, so it was a small shop.) Anyway, the next morning, some idiot calls him at 7 a.m., wakes him and raises hell about some real or imagined slight in that morning's paper. The ME says he'll look into it and will call him from the office when he gets free. Well, the ME had another desk trick that night, so after deadline -- 12:30 a.m.! -- he dials up the complainant, of course waking him up, to set him straight on why we had dropped Alley Oop or whatever his complaint was.

When the reader demanded to know why the ME was calling at such a late hour, the ME said, "You didn't hesitate to call and wake me at 7 a.m."

Boy, those were the good ol' days!  ;D

 

Caller: "Ya gotta partial score on the Yankees?"

Desker: "Yeah, 7" and hangs up.

 

This somewhat reminds me of the message I just got on my voicemail (or vice versa).

Lady: My daughter played on the, I'm not sure what it's called, umm grasshopper baseball, I guess and her team finished first. They told her there'd be something in the paper this week about it. I looked and there's nothing. It's been two and a half weeks since the tournament and I'm wondering why it has taken so long to get it into the paper. I'm hoping you can tell me and I'll have the other parents call you too.

Of course, A) I'd never heard of said event, B) never promised to put in anything about it, and C) certainly wouldn't promise to do it two weeks after the fact. I politely said it probably has taken so long because no one actually informed us of our commitment to run anything, or for that matter, informed us this happened. (Not even getting into the importance of grasshopper baseball to me).

 

You know, those callers sure can be a pain in the butt, can't they? Gosh, who do these people think they are? Customers? How dare they think of their newspaper as a place where they can call up and get a question answered or a fact checked or ask for a score. Don't they know we're all too damn busy arguing about whether Ginger is sexier than Mary Ann or trying to work out a trade for a backup goalie on our NHL fantasy team? The nerve of these people. Boy, won't it be great some day when they don't call? When they don't think of us a place where we can help them and might be willing to do so. Gosh, what a great day that will be.

 

Moderator -- I was a sports editor in Gastonia NC for six years and worked on the desk in Charlotte for nearly 7 more before I took the racing gig. And no, I wasn't always patient with people who'd call wanting 12 football scores when I knew nine were in the paper. We have our "regulars" at the Observer, from the guy who calls and wants to talk about how we hate Duke to a tennis guy who always asks for one copy editor to two guys in Georgia who were "slow" and were race fans who I used to take 10 minutes to talk to. Sometimes they get frustrating, I get that. Sometimes when they called I was just too busy to talk I just told them that as politely as I could manage to do it, which sometimes wasn't as politely as it should have been. The point, overall, is valid though. It often takes just as much time to be rude and get rid of them as it would to give them the answer they want.