Editor in Chief

Being a good reporter -- at the Collegian and elsewhere -- means being a good investigator and a good writer.

An honored novelist has nothing on a Collegian staff member if he or she can't find the story. A private eye wouldn't make it through our candidate class if he or she couldn't communicate well.

To do our jobs well, we have to do both the searching and the writing; Christopher Columbus as a poet, if you will.

But sometimes, unlike Columbus, America is brought to us. Such was the case when John O'Brien called the Collegian office a few days back.

In his message, he detailed his morning experience like no other. In the cleanest description possible: His toilet water and its, erm, "accompanying products" traveled the wrong way through the pipes -- fast.

We had a quick chuckle/gag at the thought, but knew we had a story students would want to know about. We also knew that we would have a very specific audience, allowing us to have, well, a bit more fun with the piece than the Centre Daily Times could.

So we did. And the result was exactly what we wanted.

Students all over campus were reading the story, showing their friends and spreading it across the Internet.

Who would have guessed that one of most popular stories this summer would have been total crap?

We've got some great investigators down here, and they do their jobs well. But this week has shown us some of the best stories can fall into your lap...

...after shooting into someone else's.