Alright, so I worked as News Director for a little radio station for a while, and I think I did a pretty good job of keeping objective, keeping my own opinions out of it, and so on. My philosophy: Be a political ninja. Don't let anyone know where you're coming from, so everyone's comfortable giving you their unvarnished thoughts because everyone thinks you might agree with them. And as I said, I think I stuck to it pretty well.

There was one exception.

So there was a meeting of the schoolboard . . . this was in 2002, I think? Anyway, there was a meeting, and they were discussing whether or not students should be allowed to bring cell phones - turned off - in case of emergencies. The idea being that, say there was a fire at school. That way kids could call out when they were safe, reassure their families; in theory if one was trapped and had a phone, could notify people. Seems pretty common-sense, right? Yes, you'll get the occasional kid that forgets to turn it off and 'you'll get this back at the end of the day' and so on, but that's not too much to deal with, one would think.

So the oldest dude there, essentially only had the job because no one else in the area wanted it and they just kept voting for the guy they all knew, pipes up and compares kids having phones on school property (even off) to - I shit you not - allowing them to have loaded firearms on their person during the school day.

I was flummoxed, as I'm sure you would be. After the meeting was over, I got to him one-on-one and started trying to pin down his opinion. Did the size of the phone relate to the hypothetical caliber of the imaginary gun? Was, say, a little flip phone as dangerous as a derringer, whereas a Blackberry was more like an automatic weapon? What if the school board paid for every teacher to have a cell phone jammer in their desks? Exactly how deadly would a pager be?

Though at the station everyone laughed and those of us under 40 hoped he'd die and let someone with a working brain get voted in, I never used the tape from that little Q&A session, but I did get to use the original cell phones = guns bit from his old-man tirade during the meeting. Good times.

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