Call Me! WHAA-HAA! Call me, call me, call me, anytime...

With apologies to Blondie, here's my little take from the phone control room of "We Make Holes in Teeth" (Fall 1996).

We had eight operational phone lines, not including the pus line, for people to call in and answer questions. Imagine our worry when 9 full-fledged teams registered at the beginning of the contest -- would we have to start hanging up on people in a reasonable amount of time if they couldn't give us the right answer? Would people quit playing if they couldn't get through on the phone? In the end, this ended up not being a problem at all, because most of the time two or more of these phones were not in use. Not because there weren't people on our end sitting in front of them, but because NO ONE WAS CALLING THEM.

After the second question of the contest, when only three of the lines had people talking on them, we quickly realized that the freshman teams, having never played before (silly them), simply didn't understand the concept of how the phone questions work and were not calling unless they actually knew the answer to the questions beforehand, a statistically unlikely ircumstance. This led to some hilarity, as we repeatedly had to coax some teams to stay on the phone and encourage them to ask us for hints. Many were startlingly willing to offer up their bodies and possessions for the answer, unbidden. By the end of the contest, they were doing better, but the still non-ringing phones led me to conclude that better is not good enough. So, in the spirit of fairness for all, a veteran phone jockey (I've done phones in basically every contest I've ever played in, including a few where I was the one and only person on the phone all night) offers a few tips on how to coax your friendly contest runner into helping you into the correct answers...

Be polite. This will get you a whole lot farther along than getting pissed off at them ever will. If you thank them at the end, they're sure to be more kindly inclined to you, and next phone call may start dropping bigger and bigger hints.
Be amusing. There's nothing better than making the person on the other end of the phone laugh. If you have positively no clue, make up something outrageous. Very, very, rarely you might get a point just for the humor factor alone, but in any case you've caused the person to be kindly disposed towards you.
Try. I can't emphasize this enough. If the person thinks they're handing you the answer on a silver platter and you're just being stupid on purpose so that it will be given to you, they'll quit being nice and your clues will go from "a foreign city starting with B...used to have a wall" to "a musical group from the 80s". A whole world of difference. But, if you're making a heroic effort, that will come across and frequently will end up giving you the benefit of the doubt and a few extra points.
Listen. Many times a subtle clue will be given that you might completely ignore if you're just firing off guesses.

Those are the keys to a happy phone relationship. However, for those truly new to the scene, I noticed that people really didn't understand how to ask for hints. So here's the mechanics of the thing:

[question has been read twice, song starts to play]

Call IMMEDIATELY. The second you hear a note of music, the phones can be answered. By waiting, you waste valuable answering time.
Tell them who you are.
If you know the answer to something, give it right away.
If you know the answer to nothing, give any old answer, preferably something riotously funny.
When they say "no, try again", say "can I have a hint?"
They will give you a hint. Guess again.
If you're still out in left field, ask for number of words in the answer and/or initials. Playing "animal/vegetable/mineral" is always a good idea as well.
Frequently, it is easy to dispose of entire categories of answers quite quickly, as in "does it have to do with food? With cars? With sex? With animals? With junk bonds?" Asking the person questions like these are doubly good because you demonstrate that you're working for the answer.
If you're gone through all of this, you can resort to the rhyming thing "what does it rhyme with?", but only do this as a last resort, since you're basically asking them to give you the answer and if you do it frequently, they'll stop being willing to play along.
Keep talking until they hang up on you -- never hang up first if you're still trying to answer the questions. You'd be amazed at what you can pull out of your butt at the last second.
Before getting off the phone, repeat your team name and the number of points that you think you just got, just to double-check.

In general, when looking for a song title, listen carefully to the chorus of the song. 90% of the time, it is there and will be repeated incessantly. Also, 90% of the music in a contest tends to come from the top 40 at one time or another, so a Top 40 book will be very helpful.

Further, songs and questions are put together for a reason -- go ahead and ask the person what that reason is if you're stumped -- it well may help you get the answer.

Finally, listen carefully to the voice singing. Frequently, trivia runners like to subject people to common songs sung by really scary people like William Shatner and Telly Savalas, and their voices are usually quite recognizable.

Last of all, please remember that it is a contest. Over the years, people appear to have been conditioned to think that it is their right to get a running team member on the phone and automatically come up with two points at the end of the song. This is simply not the case -- we've just been having fewer teams play in the past. Now that there are so many teams involved (viva! I hope for even more next time around!), we'll all have to get used once again to having to captivate the person on the other end to prevent being hung up on to free up the line for other guessers. It used to be an art to convince the person on the other end that you are just about to guess the right answer, and this will be true again in the very near future.

Ok, enough ranting! Looking forward to the next one! -- Jen