Perils of the newsroom

Phone call comes in. It's from the lobby front desk, which usually means that someone with a gripe wants a reporter at The Oregonian to do something about ... oh, I don't know: taxes, immigration, the Fed, the aliens. Sigh. OK.

I pick up the phone: A woman starts telling me that her filters are filthy, that she can smell smoke, no one will do anything for her. How did you get put through to me? I just asked for someone, she said. She ranted on and on, and I figured: What the hell. You never know when the next big story is coming from. So I went to the lobby and found a heavy-set woman in her 50s with graying braids and a wheelchair that she used as a pushcart. She lives in an apartment tower in The Pearl. She smells smoke all the time in her apartment, she says, as fat tears roll down her face. She even had a box full of old furnace filters. Oh, woe, no one listens to her; she hands me a stack of papers from doctors, neighbors, etc. Why yes, she says, she IS on disability from a car accident 20 years ago that left her a brain injury and "some memory problems." I said: Do you think your brain injury could be causing you to smell this? No, she said, no, no no. (gulp -- usually, that means yes, yes, yes). Then, the money quote: I tell her that I can call the Housing Authority of Portland. She replies, "They'll just tell you that I have a dirty apartment."

OK. That may well be. And it may be that she's got a terrible smell of smoke in her apartment. I don't know. And I don't know if there's even a story there. She is a parrot lady ... just the kind of noble loser that I usually fall for. But today ... not so much. Poor thing.