Monday, January 28, 2002

 

I know how she felt

In St. Paul, Minnesota, a former employee of a public television network is accused of sending threatening e-mail to a customer she considered rude. While I don't condone her actions, I can certainly understand the reasoning behind them.

The newspaper I worked for is very small and doesn't have an answering service/switchboard, so the reporters have to answer all the phones after the business office people leave for the day. I can't tell you the number of times I talked to people who literally yelled at me because they hadn't gotten their paper yet. Take into consideration this is a morning paper that normally hits newsstands/doorsteps/delivery boxes before 7 a.m. The reporters don't get to work until 2 p.m. Most of them expected me to drop whatever I was doing and deliver a paper to their house. If I did that, they'd probably be the first to complain that the City Council meeting wasn't in the next day's paper. (Uh sorry. I was out delivering papers. Didn't have time to go to any meeting.) This paper is more than 100 years old. It has never been published on July 5 or December 26 so the employees can spend July 4 and Christmas Day with their families. But I'm tellin' ya, it never failed. On July 5 and December 26 we'd get dozens of calls from people complaining about not getting their paper.

But not getting their paper is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to complaints. There are the people who get into drunken brawls, are charged with aggravated assault and beg to have it kept out of the paper. "If you print my name, I'll sue." Uh huh. There are the people who write 500-word letters to the editor thinking the 350-word limit can't possibly apply to them because "this is important and people should know about it." Buy an ad, pal. But the worst of the worst are brides. Everyone's name is spelled correctly (including all 16 members of the wedding party), every song that was sung, played, hummed and toe-tapped was mentioned, the wedding gown was described in the fullest of detail, right down to the imported white satin on the miniature decorative buttons adorning the back of the gown. But "you didn't say my bouquet (consisting of 37 varieties of rare, tropical flowers) had baby's breath in it." Honey, every bride's bouquet has baby's breath in it. You ain't nothin' special.

The point is: A person can only take so much abuse. As I said, I don't condone the actions of the woman in St. Paul, but I have to give her credit for sticking to her guns.

By the way, did I mention the former homecoming queen who, when we ran a retrospective story in 2000, had every member of her family call to tell us she was the 1979 crown-wearer and not the person we said it was? Turns out she read it wrong. We were right. Her family never read it. They just took her word for it, not ours. But what can you expect from someone hanging onto a 21-year-old homecoming queen crown?

posted by Anne 1/28/2002 01:11:00 AM