"You see, I bought this meat, it was hamburger. I fried it up, just like I always do, and was eating it in a bun, and I bit down on something hard, really hard. You know, I could have broken a tooth. I spit everything out and I found this piece of bone. I hate finding weird things in my food. I'm missing a couple teeth, so sometimes things get by that I shouldn't be swallowing. What if I had swallowed that piece of bone?"

The guy went on to say that in the past he has never had a problem with the store that sold him the meat, but this incident has him a little upset. And disgusted, as he repeatedly pointed out.

When he ran out of steam, he simply told me thanks for listening. No, he didn't particularly care to be part of a newspaper story, and hung up the phone.

This was a call from years ago when I was a reporter. When I hung up, I actually typed out the conversation and filed it away (to use as a touch of color for a future novel?) because the caller was so earnest about telling someone, even a faceless stranger, about his problem.

Newsrooms are magnets for people wanting a listening ear.

For several years I would get regular morning calls from an older woman who made a game out of finding typos in the paper. A lot of people are like that, but most come at it from the point of view that they're so smart and boy, are you people at the paper stupid. She, however, was never mean about it; instead, I sensed she just wanted someone to talk to after she finished her breakfast.

When I worked late at night there were the inevitable calls from the bars. People slurring their words would want to know who was attorney general during the Ford administration, or who won the 1982 World Series. More often than not, there was a bet riding on it, so the caller was quite insistent that we come up with the answer. Now that the Internet is available on phones, those kinds of calls seem to have dropped significantly.

In the old days when funeral homes called to dictate obituaries, the rule in the newsroom was if you answer the phone, you take the dictation -- no passing it off to the intern. Even the managing editor was not immune to the rule. Knowing there could be a dead person with dozens of survivors and a host of organizations they belonged to on the other end often made folks wary about answering the phone. But the most dedicated reporters also knew the call just as easily could be a hot story and grabbed it on the second ring.

The voice-mail revolution has put a crimp in the random calls we get, but thankfully people with stories to tell are still getting through. Plus, there's e-mail -- especially if you use compelling words in the subject line to ring an editor's chimes.

So keep calling. We want to hear from you, even if it's just about your bad hamburger experience.