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Shut up.
That’s what my doctor told me a couple of weeks ago when I visited him to complain about my lingering laryngitis. Don’t even whisper, he said. Your voice won’t come back unless you give it complete rest.
Okey doke, I said through the glutinous gravel that seemed to be lying on my vocal cords.
But this was a problem: I am a reporter, and I need to use my voice to ask questions. Well, I thought, let’s muddle through this the best we can. So I started devising coping strategies.
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I fired off e-mail questions to a couple of people, hoping a clear e-mail reply or a series of e-mails and replies would give me enough for two feature stories.
And I headed off to the Keystone Agricultural Producers convention with notebooks, felt markers, and the challenge of proving that dumbness does not pose an insurmountable obstacle to a reporter.
Usually when I sit through a speech, I take brief notes and draw big asterisks beside points that I later want to interview the speaker about. But being dumb meant that I couldn’t run up to a speaker and start yammering at him. I had to have the questions written out in advance.
And I couldn’t just point to squigglies and asterisks in my notes. I would have to write out each question legibly, and write out a string of questions that would take me where I wanted to get.
For a couple of these interviews I was assisted by the collegiality, professionalism and darned niceness of two fellow reporters from competing publications who took my written questions and asked them for me during scrums.
Kathleen McCallum, special assistant to Manitoba agriculture minister Rosann Wowchuk, also proffered this favour Ð and surprisingly didn’t even change my words.
I conducted a few interviews completely unassisted, with subjects having to read my scrawled questions from the notebook.
This rattled one person, who couldn’t at first figure out what weirdness I was up to, but it brought a wry smile to another man’s face, who noted that a reporter who couldn’t speak was much easier to deal with.
I never did hear back from the people I e-mailed.
After the week was up, I reactivated my voice Ð and it worked. Sort of.
It was useable, anyway.
That’s a relief, because it isn’t impossible to be a reporter without a voice, but it’s annoying, exhausting and frustrating.
