Keep the complaints coming

When I was the city reporter at the Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, Mo., I used to feel my heart sag every time I came to my desk and found my message light blinking.

I should have been excited: The message might be from someone I had been trying to reach all day for an interview, and that blinking light might represent the key to finally wrapping up my story.

But instead, it usually triggered this reaction: “What now?”

I was conditioned by many experiences when that blinking light was a message from an upset reader, calling to complain because:

-       They didn’t like my story.

-       They felt I didn’t address something important.

-       They felt one side was underrepresented.

-       They were upset with something the city was doing in a story I wrote.

-       They felt something was inaccurate.

-       Or they just felt I should be spending my time doing something else.

 

My first reaction was always defensiveness. I would wonder why people would actually go to the lengths of calling me to leave nasty messages about these things: Didn’t they have better things to do?

Once I took a step back, I would further examine what they were saying: Did they have a point? Was I balanced? Did I leave out something important? Was something inaccurate? Should I go back to my college job of delivering pizzas?

After answering the latter question in the negative, I would work on a response. Sometimes they were confused and didn’t know what they were talking about. Sometimes they were right, and I had dropped the ball. And sometimes it was a matter of opinion.

It didn’t matter though, I never saw the true and wonderful value of complaints. I thought they were negative thoughts people should keep to themselves  — until now.

Our paper in Laramie, Wyo., is horrendous. Horrible. Like, a we-print-press-releases-verbatim type of horrible. A one-source-only type of rag. To put it mildly, I’m disgusted at what this paper calls journalism, and I’m ashamed that people here accept this paper’s low standards as OK.

If this were the paper of record in Columbia, that message light would always be blinking. People there simply would not stand for it.

Here, it ‘s representative of a larger attitude of the small town: It’s the way it’s always been. What are you going to do? Case closed.

To me, this kind of attitude inertia is what has kept Laramie without much progress other than at the university in the past decade.

And what I’ve noticed is you don’t hear complaints, like you would from people who have higher expectations. Instead, you get excuses of why things are the way they are and why they aren’t changing anytime soon.

One of my friends said it’s partially acceptance, and partially that he thinks people deep down like the fact that they’re different from other places – even if it’s not necessarily in a favorable way.

But for me, it’s hard coming from someplace where complaints are valued so much that the local paper has an answering machine for nothing but complaints, which it then prints in the paper as a column of comments. Frequent topics in this column include threads about dogs peeing on other people’s yards, bicyclists not obeying rules of the road and democrats spending too much money in Congress.

As much as I sometimes hated hearing them, it is the sort of discourse that lets people share their expectations. In my newfound appreciation for complaints, I think that’s really what a solid complaint is: a statement of disappointment about the way things are, and hopefully, an intent to change things by pointing it out.

I know there are some who, like the former me, believe that complaints are worthless whining that serve no purpose.

Of course excessive complaints can generate negativity and unhappiness — without a doubt. But the absence of complaints also represents acceptance and compliance.

Some things we must accept – especially those we cannot change. And all the complaining in the world won’t change that.

But the other kind – the kind that represents an idea of betterment, a possibility for improvement, are needed.

So keep the complaints coming.

And I’ve got one to start, or maybe it’s really more of a request: Can we please have a Target in Laramie?