Hostage situation

I have several writing assignments for a special section of the paper involving profiles of local businesses or organizations.

Naturally, all of these require that I have conversations with spokespeople for these entities.

And that leads me to the thing I hate most about these assignments – playing phone tag.

That’s because our culture has reached a point where nobody in anything remotely resembling a position of authority answers their phone.

So the routine is to put out the calls, leaving callback messages, and then sit and wait. And wait. And wait.

You get the idea.

I’m stuck here until they call, and I freaking hate being held hostage like this. That was part of why I got out of the newspaper business 10 years ago.

Photography is a different story. You just go out and shoot. But writing (responsible writing, anyway) requires getting people to talk to you and it’s almost always at their convenience.