How many of you out there can ask your significant other, “What day does hockey season begin again?” and fully expect him/her/it to know the answer? Because I totally can.
Note: My sweetie is not so fortunate — I’m not so good with facts — but she doesn’t need anyone to tell her when the first puck drops.
I used to carry such facts in my head as part of my job. As sports agate clerk at the Journal, I was the person who answered the generic telephone known as “The Sports Desk” as opposed to a specific reporter. So I got asked such questions a LOT.
I also remember getting lots of trivia questions, especially on Saturday nights as patrons of sports bars would make bets with each other over some really obscure statistic or other. The later it got, the drunker the callers were, and the weirder the questions were. Now I really wish I’d written some of them down — they’d make great diversions in “Murder at the Sports Desk,” for example.
Carol Anne, were you there long enough and during the right epoch to judge the effect the Internet had on such phone calls? I hypothesize that both the calls and the job itself were obsoleted by the easy access of information to all.
I admit I don’t know (and haven’t experimented with) whether drunk dialing or searching is harder.
Keith, at the time I was there, the Internet was only used by an extremely small bunch of weirdos. I had just joined AOL, and at the time there were only 20,000 members. So the drunks in the sports bars really didn’t have anybody to call but the sports desk of the newspaper.
Actually, the position of agate clerk has not become obsolete — the agate clerk is now the person who packages all of the information for the drunks in sports bars to find on the Internet via their smart phones, as well as all of the box scores and such in the paper version of the newspaper.