I'm not sure where I picked up the hobby, but I think it can be traced to the Drops of Ink newsroom at Libertyville High School, fall semester, 1995.

It was my first experience in journalism, and one of the first lessons was the importance of quoting sources accurately. Another lasting lesson was the humor potential of accurately quoting your newspaper colleagues.

Whenever anyone said something amusing — whether laugh-out-loud funny at the time or simply offbeat and worth a later review — I'd find a margin and jot it down. At the end of the year, when we produced a staff yearbook, the quotes pages were always my favorite. Sometimes remembering the context brought back a pleasant memory. Sometimes the sheer absence of context made a comment even funnier.

I moved my quote log from newsroom to classroom — specifically Miss Holtsford's government class during my senior year at LHS and then my freshman psychology class with professor Wendy Dunn at Coe College. While I was doing a semi-decent job of taking notes on the 18th Amendment or cerebral hemispheres, I was excelling at recording things both women said. Upon further review, perhaps not the most productive use of my time.

That said, I can't recall the name of the woman who taught my consumer education class that same year of high school. Not that she did a bad job (She taught me how to write checks and why to avoid the stock market, both skills having served me well in the years since.), but I've found when you can spend time with someone genuinely laughing with and at each other, you form a true lasting bond.

For a few of my years at the Clinton Herald, I had the pleasure of sitting across a partition from Sonja Young, an eternally sweet woman who happened to be a veritable fountain of funny. She knew she had a reputation for being amusing and would play it up if she knew I was paying attention (She had a special skill for making double entendres during otherwise benign phone calls just to make me laugh.), but her best comments came totally out of left field. I wish I could put my hands on my list of Sonja quotes.

After about six months in The Times newsroom, I began yet another list of workplace quotes. I'm sure there were other amusing things said sooner, but when a reporter returned from an assignment and declared, "It's always a good interview when you come back with chocolate on your pants," I couldn't resist.

Some of the quotes I recorded for posterity are revealing, as when one employee explained the data entry process to a new hire: "You've got to kind of edit it. Take out the junky stuff."

Others were clearly intended in jest and may not have elicited a response at the time. But comedy is tragedy, plus time, right? (One employee, offering a cookie to another: "C'mon, the worst that can happen is you die.")

And some things on my list are simply random, as in the page designer who, while eating pizza, said, "Why did that bite taste like cinnamon?" Or reporter, while on the phone, saying, "Do you need to check that buzzer? (pause) OK, I didn't want an Alzheimer's patient wandering away."

I'm not the only person who takes such measures. In fact, a relatively new Web site, http://overheardinthenewsroom.com, culls laugh lines from newspaper, TV and radio newsrooms across the world. It's like all the wiseacres in all the media outlets in the country sharing the best of the best from their quote files for the pleasure of all. Here's a quick sampling from the main page Monday:

"This guy on the phone wants his comics. I mean he WANTS his comics. And he sounds dangerous."

"Your story is very clear. It's not interesting, but it's very clear."

"The human being in me hopes it stays quiet tonight, but the producer in me hopes it doesn't."

I could go on, but I get the sense the joke may be lost on those who have not toiled in a modern newsroom. I'm sure funny things are said in offices all over the place (hence www.overheardintheoffice.com), but experience shows there's a certain kind of personality that thrives in the media marketplace, and my goal today is to celebrate those souls.

Covering the news can be downright ugly. Stand on the curb in the middle of a December snowstorm watching someone's home burn to the ground. Look in the eyes of a murder victim's mother outside a courtroom. Follow an ambulance to a horrific crash scene. Makes those public hearings about tax levies seem like Sunday school by comparison.

There's not a lot of chances to be funny in newsprint. Outside the comics, people don't want their hometown paper to look like the Harvard Lampoon. But if we in the news business don't laugh at ourselves every so often, we might just lose it altogether. Which is why I wrote down this gem, said by a tenacious colleague after an especially long day:

"I'm going to go home and crash, and if anyone tries to wake me up, I'm going to hurt someone."

We've all been there. Which is why we can all look back together and laugh.

• SCOTT T. HOLLAND is former associate editor of The Times but continues to contribute his column plus help with editing, writing and page design. He can be reached at scotth@mywebtimes.com.