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Wednesday, May 7, 2003 - 5:23 p.m.

When January really means Jane

Somehow, I get all the general � and occassionally random � calls at work. I guess because the company's receptionist still has my job title as "editorial assistant." Or, as we in the magazine biz sagely say, "office bitch." When people call and don't know who they want to talk to, they speak with the receptionist, whom, I gather, simply finds out which magazine they are looking for, and sends the calls to the first editorial assistant on the list. That would be me.

So today, a woman calls and wants to know where we got a story about a somewhat famous recent national headline that ran in a section we have in every issue.

"Yes, we have that section in every issue," I told her.

"I've never seen it before," she replied. "I'm holding your magazine. Who wrote this?"

She went on to throw out names of people I couldn't find anywhere in the story and say things like, "Who told you this? I bet it was Ray. I've been telling Ray to move out of the neighborhood for years, but he won't listen."

"Look at this," she rambled on, "January � that's Jane � on page 54, the year she was born. Leslie and her daughter Jane. That's my street. I went to Dr. Simmons, and he told me this. How do you get this? Who sent this up? I bet it was John."

That's not a direct quote, but it certainly covers the gist of what she was saying. It could be funny if I knew the background, but I hesitate to make jokes because it's very possible this was some old woman (from the sound of her voice) who maybe missed her 3 p.m. pill, if you know what I mean, or managed to punch our phone number into her phone while whoever was supposed to be watching her this afternoon took a nap or became enthralled in Oprah.

What led me to this conclusion was her insistence that "January � it's right there on the page, that's Jane" was not what it appeared to be. She was reading something else than what was printed on the page, the way Russell Crowe did in A Beautiful Mind. I think she was trying to tell me that the entire article was some secret code.

It's interesting, too, because the first thing she asked was who wrote it, and while we generally do not put bylines on our stories because they are often short and really just pieced-together bits from a variety of outlets, this was a longer, first-person reporting job done by one of our off-site freelancers, and the byline was right there at the end. Had I opened up the issue when I first picked up the phone, I might've figured all this out sooner.

I just hope she wasn't trying to tell me something. You know, in code.

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