I'D LIKE TO REPORT A SCORE.

For the past few weeks, I've been taking prep calls again. Not a lot. But a few to help out during the busy basketball season. I've been reminded of the wonderful joy that is taking these calls. And by joy, I mean slight torture.

About half the calls feature plenty of noise (other people, music, the horn from another game) in the background, so you have to make the caller repeat the spelling of names about a thousand times. The other day, the caller said the kid's name three times. I couldn't make heads or tails out of it. I ask the caller to spell the name please. "J-O-N-E-S."

Other times, the person is naturally hard to understand. That can turn what should be a minute phone call into a solid five minutes, where I'm sitting there on the phone with a pen in my hand pretending to stab myself in the eye.

Max and I have a favorite. It's the beginning of these conversations.
Caller: Have a boys game to report.
Max: OK. What was the score?
Caller: 60-48. (As if Max psychically knows which teams played. That leads to:)
Max: Uh. Who won?
Caller: Insert team name.
Max: Who lost?
Caller: Insert team name.

On Friday night, I finally got a caller to say the score with the teams. Except:

Me: What was the score?
Caller: Ellender 53, Helen Cox 55.

We used to pay those who call in prep boxes $10 a call. This was back in the day (I know. I'm only 25.) when we got 80 calls a night. That's $800 a night for people (who don't work here) to call in prep scores. Sometime in (I want to say) 2004, we did away with that.

Yet Friday night, Max had to tell a caller that we would not pay him for the boxscore. Shams says that has happened about 10 times this season. Eh, it's only been five years since we stopped paying. These things take time to make the rounds.

When we did pay $10, I would always suggest that we cut it down to $5 per call, take the money we saved and have a big crawfish boil. Never happened.

THE TINA CURSING CORNER

My mom likes her new nail guy. "My nails have been growing really well lately. Now that I've got somebody who knows what the fuck he's doing."

Mom is unhappy with me early Friday.
Mom: Why did you leave these two TVs blaring last night?
Me: I didn't. I came home and went to bed. Didn't do anything to these TVs.
Mom: Bullshit! (Really, I didn't. If they were blaring, it was because she left them on.)

Mom hasn't been drinking the water she likes. "I can't find my grape water. Fucking Winn Dixie's been out of it the last three times."

I'm finishing up my seafood lunch. Mom looks at the wreckage. "There's fucking crawfish all over the ketchup bottle."

Mom still doesn't know what to do about the treadmill situation. "I'm scared to get on the fucking treadmill. I might go flying through the fucking wall. The belt heats up too much at about 12 minutes. At 3.6, it feels like I'm still walking. Then, all of a sudden, I'm going so fucking fast. I can't keep up. And there's shit all over the floor. I don't know what it is. Pieces of the treadmill, I guess."

Mom doesn't like the condition of my shoes. "When you gonna buy some new fucking shoes?"

THE GENE POOL DIP (I MEAN TIP) OF THE WEEK

Don't drive on Airline Highway near the city for the next few weeks. Just don't do it. It's a freakin traffic nightmare. I moved 20 feet every minute for 20 minutes Friday afternoon.

They're repaving the road. That's great. Love a smooth road. But I can't sit in that traffic every day for the next whatever weeks. You know how much gas that wastes? The condition of Airline sucks because I use that road to go to work and to Hornets games.

I just figured out the reason for the new road, though. They want to make sure the highway leading to Pancho's has no bumps for the big reopening.

PARTING SHOTS
Liam reads quite the line on the front page of nola.com. It's from a JD column.

JD: Never has one groin meant so much to so many.
(Brick tells this to Marcus on AIM.)
Marcus: That's my motto. Yours?

I'm telling Brick and JRap how I almost got kicked out of a Hornets game recently by Lady Usher. I then turn around and start saying things at the Hornets-Raptors game like, "Oh, baby" and "Get it" and "Oh, baby" again.

Brick (on AIM): If that's how you were cheering, I understand. She thought you were hitting on her.

THE DAILY TOP LIST
The top five pieces of good news at work this week.

5) Online AP style book.
There is no entry for bunghole, though.

4) Skittles.
Had my first bag in more than a month. Still five cents, baby.

3) New computers.
Word came down this week that we're getting new computers at some point. Can we beat the shit out of these?

2) Blogging.
Pretty soon someone will be assigned each night to edit content on nola.com. I like the idea of this.

1) Resignation.
A writer we all hate resigned earlier this week. We're going to have a party celebrating his departure, and he won't be invited.