Routinely someone will comment that since I have been in the news business for many years, I’ve probably heard a lot of funny stories along the way. And yes I have.

Today I’ve chosen a sampling that indeed were humorous. At times you will see reports of past events where they say, “the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” I am not going to use any names here in order to protect me. I’ve just bought a new set of tires.

So there was that call I got at 3 a.m. from a woman who was very intoxicated, and I initially was upset with her for waking me up. She told me that there was something going on in her community, and I should get my camera and get down there right away.

“There are cops all over the place,” she slurred.

She told me she wasn’t sure what was going on but was convinced that it had to be big. Then she started giving me directions.

“You pass that old tobacco barn and take left. You go about two miles and take another left,” she continued in her Jim Beam vernacular.

Then there was a pause. I thought she had drifted off to sleep or something. But she came back with some alarm.

“No! No! No! Don’t take that last left. There’s not a road there,” she declared. “You could get hurt!”

Then there was the day when the woman emptied her revolver at her husband, eventually hitting him. Fortunately he survived. After the story appeared in the newspaper, she came in unannounced to severely chastise me for the report.

She was a large person and had another large person with her, and they stood between me and the door to my office. My first thought was that this was not going to be good.

“This had no business being the newspaper,” she yelled, shaking that day’s edition at me. This was a family shooting!”

One person complained that I got a story about his arrest all wrong, and he wanted to tell me “really how it all went down.”

So he began in great detail. Along the way I stopped him and asked if he realized he was actually confessing to a crime prior to his trial.

There was a moment of silence and then he said, “I’ll start over. Let me tell you how it allegedly all went down.”

Some incidents are real jewels. For instance, there was an out-of-state woman who stopped a funeral procession in front of the office to come in an jump all over me for “messing up” her brother’s obituary. I was assuming that for someone to actually stop a funeral procession the error had to be a “grave” one. (Couldn’t resist the pun.) Our reporter had identified her brother’s business connection as being an accountant with a particular firm in another city. She was upset that we did not state that he was a “certified public accountant.” And I kept my cool until she started using some very nasty language, and I suggested that she go bury her brother and that quite possibly he was not the only one who was “certified.”