Hot off the Stover: Innocent stories have provoked complaints
Since I began writing for the paper about three months ago, I have been lucky not to receive many complaints about how or what I write. I have only gotten a few complaints and by complaints I mean someone writing or calling me to express their dislike of something I wrote.
To my surprise, the complaints I have received haven’t been on important breaking news or even my opinionated Hot off the Stover columns. Instead, I have made people angry over rolling yards and skydiving.
Yes readers, believe it or not, articles about fun — not hard core news that might have been reported incorrectly — have brought about my verbal lashings.
Now this confuses me a bit. For other stories I’ve written I prepared myself for complaints, even thinking of polite ways I would handle the criticism when it arrived.
You can’t please everybody all the time, nor do I try, but by nature I’m a Libra, and I need balance and harmony so most of my opinions consider both sides of the situation. I don’t set out to ruffle people’s feathers.
I can also understand people not liking what I write and going on disliking my thoughts on things, but it seems someone would have to be really upset to put forth the effort to contact the paper and complain.
For these two stories I was not prepared for unhappy readers. Wait, let me rephrase that for my “mad” readers. For the yard rolling article I can understand the fact some people don’t like to have their yards rolled, whereas I myself see it as a status symbol.
I don’t roll yards of people I don’t like. It wastes my time and money on someone I wouldn’t give the time of day anyway. Now I don’t really dislike very many people, but rolling their yard would just show them I think about them, when I don’t.
On my skydiving article I was thrilled, the key word being “was.” After I jumped I told everyone about my great experience and how friendly everyone at the skydiving center was and how they made it about me having fun. Good word-of-mouth advertisement is the best, right? Wrong!
I got call after call from people wondering if it was really that great, would I do it again and even a call from the owner of the center telling me he liked the story.
But to my surprise the recounting of my experience didn’t sit well with the skydiver who was looking for a reporter to do the story. I was told what an embarrassment my article had been which has now made me a little reluctant to talk about my experience at all.
I am very opinionated and have no problem talking about something I’m passionate about or have an opinion on, but I don’t know how to respond to complaints when there’s really nothing to debate.
From this experience I have learned never jump into another reporter’s stories and always prepare, no matter what the story, for someone to be vocal about their dislike of my reportage.
This whole experience has now left me with some questions. Why are we so critical of one another? Why do we let some important things go but get angry over nothing? If we put half as much effort into something important as we do complaining about nothing could we make a difference in that something? Are the majority of people angry hateful beings just waiting for someone to do or say something they don’t like so they can be their truly hateful selves instead of the nice friendly person they pretend to be?
Melissa Stover is a reporter for the Standard. She can be reached at 473-2191 or by e-mail at [email protected].