I got to work early this morning and was greeted with two voicemails from over the weekend. The first one was from a woman who will be competing at the Paralympic Games later this month. I did a front-page feature on her last week, and she called to say thanks, and that the story made both her and her family cry (in a good way... it was a pretty emotional story).
So that was nice.
And then there was message number two. From a woman who calls me about once every eight months to bitch. Bitch about the fact that we no longer run our "weekly sports calendar" down the front of our sports section. There are numerous reasons we no longer do this – from a design point of view, it doesn't look good with our new design; it's very time-consuming and I no longer have the time to do it; and space is at a premium in our paper these days, and I'd rather fill that space with a real story.
I have told this woman this many, many times. She's called ever since we switched the design of our paper, which was three years ago now. She says we don't do a good enough job of covering high school sports events because she doesn't know when tournaments are, etc.. now that we don't have the calendar.
I've also told her that, while these events are not in a calendar form any longer, they are mixed into the rest of the sports section in various spots, and they're pretty easy to find if she'd bother to look. She does not.
I've also told her that, if she can't find it in our paper, there's a little thing called the Internet that has all kinds of information on it – I mean, where the hell does she think I find the information?
Also, keep in mind that, over the past three-plus years, she is the only, ONLY person to ever complain about this issue.
The only one.
The message she left me today said: "I'm again disappointed with your lack of high school sports coverage despite the fact that I have complained numerous times."
I feel like calling her back and explaining to her that, unfortunately, the whims of one old woman do not drive the decisions of our newspaper.
And that it's been three years. Maybe she should get over it.
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