FROM THE OVEN: Phone Lines and Punch Lines

Reporting requires making lots of phone calls, sometimes to complete strangers. Here's what happens when the complete stranger you thought would be on the other end of the line turns out to be a completely different complete stranger: 

In order to write about the threat of minimum wage that loomed over California state workers as a result of the legislature's budget impasse, I had to get in touch with a sampling of state employees.

When I called the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, a receptionist said she would transfer me to the appropriate person and proceeded to put me on hold. Moments later, I was somehow connected with an angry man in Iowa who was calling the CCPOA for an entirely separate and unknown reason.

"Someone has their lines crossed," he said. 

Perhaps to lift his audibly foul spirits, the man decided I was the perfect audience for a joke.

"If Obama and Nancy Pelosi were on a boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, and they were sinking, who would be saved?"

"Uhh ... "

"America!"

Then he hung up.