Just Look At All Of This Shit On My Desk

My boss asked me to clean my desk, because, as part of our brand new newscast, there will be a person with a camera roving around the newsroom and we can't have it look like hobos have taken up residence in my cubicle.

I haven't cleaned it. Yet. Because really, news folks should have messy desks. You'd like to think that the guy covering your beat is relentlessly saving tiny fact morsels, written down on the back of matchbooks and cocktail napkins, inside the cover of the AP Stylebook and on the underside of the desk. That last one is reserved solely for information that will bring shame to a sitting president.

Colin Quinn Saw My Tweets, Came To My Desk, And Kicked Me In The Ball

All I said was this: Colin Quinn is on Charlotte Today, so I wonder if anybody is going to get pulled backward through a wall, Remote Control style. No really. Here:

I call people out on Twitter quite a bit. The difference between doing it there and doing it, say, over the sink in the men's bathroom is that on Twitter, if you put their handle in your tweet, THEY CAN SEE EVERYTHING YOU SAY. It's not like replying to @barackobama is equal to having a red phone connected to the White House. But still.

A few minutes after Charlotte Today was over, somebody kicked the exercise ball I sit on at work. I figured it was Mike from Production, because it's always Mike from Production. So, I did like I always do. I slowly turned around and said something snarky.

Except no, it wasn't Mike from Production, it was Colin Quinn. He had seen my tweet and wanted to know who this guy was who was talking about him behind his back. I was on ball-kick-response autopilot. It took a full ten seconds before I realized who it was.

The Time When Hall & Oates' Manager Called Me And Went On An Unsolicited Epic Rant

Hall and Oates' manager called me as I was sitting in my car in front of a Rite Aid. It was rainy. He was returning my call. I rang him up because I had seen the new Callin' Oates hotline and I wanted to see if Daryl Hall and John Oates themselves had heard of it. He sent me a statement earlier in the day that began "Dear Jerry." Not the first time that's happened.

But then, he called. He apologized for the delay in getting back to me. He sounded a bit flustered. He had been taking a bunch of calls from the media all day. And that's when it just started. He launched into an epic rant directed not at me, but at all H&O haters. These guys have been doin' it right for more than 40 years, he said. They make classics. They're still selling out arenas. Relevant? They've never not been relevant. And rock critics who aren't relevant themselves want to hate on these guys? Over the next five minutes, he spit out the most passionate defense of Hall & Oates I've ever heard.

That's when the F-bombs started dropping.

Livin' The Meme: The guy behind Callin' Oates

Michael Selvidge woke up early on a Tuesday morning. He felt like he was coming down with something. A cold, probably. He walked to the couch and opened his computer. He got on Twitter. He started typing. He planned on eating breakfast. He never got the chance. What happened next left him so busy, so obsessive and so adrenaline packed that his stomach was empty until 7 p.m., when he calmed down enough to woof down some tortellini with white sauce and broccoli.

Selvidge is the guy who created Callin' Oates, a hotline that plays a Hall and Oates song of your choosing. There are four. Rich Girl. Maneater. One on One. Private Eyes. You call 719-26-OATES. You push a button. Music plays. That's it.

Over a two day period in late December, more than 332,000 calls had come in. Hundreds more dialed in every minute. It's become viral in a way that harkens back not to YouTube or LOLcats but, instead, Tommy Tutone and 867-5309. It's not meant for your smartphone. It's meant for any phone. And because of it, thousands of people are gleefully doing something customer service lines have taught us to hate: dialing a number, pushing a button, then being subjected to decades-old soft rock.