[sorry, this is a long string of anecdotes]<p>When I was part of a city desk's copy desk that had only one phone number, I was known for my willingness to deal with odd callers while I did my real job.<p>Suicide prevention was my specialty. Such calls were especially frequent on Sunday nights, when people were under the influence and had a workweek looming. I'd listen to their problems, then tell them it's a mistake to kill oneself on a weekend. After all, one can find help on a Monday. I'd suggest agencies to call or other sources of help.<p>I sat next to a guy nearing retirement who answerd a call and heard a woman say, "Oh, thank God. I just needed to hear a man's voice again."<p>At my first desk job I sat across from a joker who, on a busy evening, fielded a call from a talkative, apparently lonely woman. After two minutes of barely getting a word in, he put the receiver in a desk drawer and went about his work. Every few minutes he'd pull out the receiver and say "yes" or "uh huh" or some such acknowledgment. No one else got any work done because we were falling on the floor laughing.<p>At 1:30 one morning, as the last two of us prepared to leave the office, the phone rang. Beth picked it up. Her face turned whiter than the drifting snow outside. Seems an elderly man was requesting that we send a photographer to capture for posterity his reattaching of a fallen live wire to his house. He said he figured he'd be providing the flash. He and his frail wife had waited for a week for the utility company to turn their power back on. They needed electricity to run a machine that kept her alive. <p>I told Beth to suggest that he call the utility company. He had -- many times. I suggested that he call the police. He had. I suggested that he leave the power line alone while we called the police. He went along with that, and the police nudged the utility company into making the repair.<p>Keeping score of complaints about biased stories can be fun. "Hmm, five callers say we're too liberal, four say we're too conservative, two say we're anti-religion, three are fed up with our indulgence of conservative Christians, three sensed racism and one says we need to stop pandering to the n------" -- all based on interpretations of the same story.<p>A friend tells of the day he got into an argument with a caller about a television program. She didn't like the show and wanted him to take it off the air. He tried to explain that the paper was in no way affiliated with the TV station. She didn't buy that. Of course, these days she'd probably be right.<p>[ June 14, 2004: Message edited by: Wayne Countryman ]</p>
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