The public needs to be warned

I answer the phone in a calm voice, “Hello, Vanguard newsroom, Tina speaking.”

On the other end is sheer panic. “Mom, when are we going to start my project? I only have 11 days!!!”

This coming from the same kid who thinks not only can a hockey team come back and tie a game with 13.7 seconds remaining, but there’s enough time to score the winning goal too.

With caller display these days, it’s rare to answer a phone not knowing who’s on the other end. Still, you never really know what to expect. Like when a reader called the newspaper’s office recently.

I did my usual, “Hello, Vanguard newsroom, Tina speaking” to which the person on the other end asked me, “Are you alive?” “Excuse me?” I said. “Are you alive?” they asked a second time. “Yes,” I said, to which their response was, “Are you breathing?”

Okay, I was thinking, is there a point to this?

The point, it turned out, was the caller was so used to getting a recorded voice on the other end, she was surprised to have been hooked up immediately to a human being.

Another time at home I picked up the phone for a ‘private caller.’ On the other end was someone conducting a survey. Their first question was to ask if I was a journalist. I said I was, to which they said that disqualified me from the taking the survey.

Of course my journalistic instincts kicked in – What are they trying to hide? – so I asked why I couldn’t participate. The person on the other end didn’t know and put me on hold to ask his supervisor. He came back to tell me it was because the survey dealt with political events and, being a journalist, I would be up on the details.

Apparently they weren’t interested in finding out how much their respondents knew about current events, they were more interested in finding out how much they didn’t. Which probably explains why a surveyor kept me on the phone for 25 minutes a couple of years ago asking me about logging practices.

Another odd call I had in the newsroom happened a year or two ago from an elderly gentleman who has since passed on. He had had a meal delivered to his home as part of a meal delivery community service program but seemed out of sorts about the fact his meal had been delivered to his door at 9 a.m. rather than the usual time hours later.

In an extremely serious tone he told me I had to write a story to “warn” the people of Yarmouth. “Of what?” I asked. “That their doorbell could ring at anytime of the morning by someone delivering a meal to them, of course,” he said.

He was very insistent. Eight minutes of insistency to be exact. “The people need to be warned,” he kept repeating over and over.

The dictionary in my computer defines a warning as a threat or a sign that something bad is going to happen; advice to be careful or to stop doing something.

How would I write this one up, I thought to myself.

The people of Yarmouth are to be warned that a kind-hearted volunteer might deliver a meal to their door. Please exercise extreme caution when saying thank you. “Sir,” I politely said. “Do you really think this person is going to go around at random everyday ringing people’s doorbells at 9 a.m. to deliver them a hot lunch?” “You don’t seem to have a very keen idea of what could interest the public reader,” he said. I could tell he was annoyed with me. “The public needs to be warned.”

In my business language counts for a lot, and finally he seemed to grasp the point of what he was trying to get across and dropped the sinister reference to a warning.

The volunteer who had delivered his meal, he said, had delivered it early because he had to drive a woman to the hospital who was going to deliver a baby.

He thought it would make an interesting story.

It certainly made for an interesting call.