I answer what I feel like answering
This isn’t a help desk and I’m not on a clock. Some questions get a whole post. Some get one line. Most get read and nothing else. No hard feelings either way.
Ask Berry
Go on. Ask me something.
The city, the county, the town, or whether you ought to take that job in Lakeland. Fill out a ticket and it goes in the window with everybody else’s. I work the ones I want to work.
No promises, no queue number, no little email saying your inquiry is important to me. Some get a whole post. Most get read and that’s the end of it. Bless your heart in advance.
House rules
Four things before you write in
Ask about anything
The city, the county, the town, or whether you ought to take the job in Lakeland. I have opinions about all four and only one of them is any good.
A name is optional
Leave it blank and I’ll run it as “a reader.” Put it in and I’ll use it. Your call, and it’s the only thing on this form I won’t second-guess you on.
Nothing here is privileged
I protect people who talk to me, but an email is an email — no law makes it secret just because you sent it to a strawberry. Don’t send me anything that puts your job or your family at risk. Ask me something safe instead.
Before you send it
The part I mean seriously
Email is email. Sending it to a strawberry doesn’t make it secret, and no law protects it just because it landed here. I don’t give people up — that one’s a promise — but I can’t make your inbox private and neither can anybody else.
So don’t send me anything that costs you your job. Don’t send me anything you weren’t allowed to have. If a thing is genuinely dangerous to say out loud, go find a lawyer or a newsroom with one on retainer, and go there first.
How to read the answers
Satire vs. receipts
Here’s the deal, and it’s a short one. Anything I say about a person — what they meant, what they were thinking, whose lunch they were at — that’s a joke, and y’all should read it as one. Anything I say happened comes with a receipt stapled to it, or it doesn’t run at all. Every figure on this site is invented for the bit unless there’s a document sitting right next to it. Jokes are jokes. Paper is paper. I don’t mix them.