Daily Newsie

I just spent a few hours helping the mayor with some last-minute campaign details after a very hectic day at work, and my brain is too fried to think of anything remotely intelligent to say for today’s post … so I shall regale you with the tale of the most irrelevant story ever. I promise I won’t spend too much time this month talking about the old newspaper, but the stories are so good!

It all started when I received a call from a source about a scam in my state wherein people would call someone pretending they had been selected for jury duty and try to worm information out of them. My source was willing to talk about the scam, and had someone at the courthouse willing to talk about it as well. Nothing groundbreaking, but a simple piece that would hopefully keep people from blurting out their social security numbers to any old yahoo on the phone.

Nope, said my editor. Since it hasn’t hit [our county], there’s no use telling everyone about it.

What did my illustrious leader suggest instead? A story on the hemlock woolly adelgid, a small insect that attaches itself to the underside of hemlock branches and sucks them dry. The tree dies, the adelgid hitches a ride on a passing deer, and the cycle begins again. According to the press release, the woolly adelgid hadn’t made an appearance anywhere near our county, but was hanging out in a nearby state. That’s right — it hadn’t even been seen in Kentucky. I pointed out that, by her aforementioned standards, this story was doubly useless, but she informed me that she had hemlock trees in her yard (she thought), and so therefore it was important. Did I mention she doesn’t live in our county?

Anyway, I called some nature guy and listened to him ramble on forever about this thing, then set about finding a local nature person to talk about hemlocks in our county. I called someone at a state park in a nearby county who said that the park had a small stand of hemlocks, but they were far enough away from other hemlocks that it was nearly impossible for them to get infested. And then I called the ag extension lady, who informed me that there aren’t any hemlock trees in our county, and they are few and far between in surrounding counties.

I had to do the story anyway. You know why? Because my editor was convinced she had hemlock trees in her yard. So instead of saving some poor old lady from getting scammed, I penned an informative article on the hemlock woolly-freaking-adelgid, which I’m sure absolutely no one read except maybe the nature guy.

Sharing time! What’s the most useless, ridiculous thing you’ve ever done or been forced to do by a crazy editor/boss?