Fear is contagious. Fear can be the physical kind. Fear can be of the kind that causes financial panics in securities and commodities markets. Fear can even sweep a bourse floor and stop dealers from making deals that five minutes before would have been no-brainers.

My office saw a demonstration of the physical kind yesterday. The fun and games began when the National Weather Service announced that conditions were right for the formation of severe weather.

That kind of announcement is unusual. I thought it was silly. Imagine that. Late spring in Wisconsin, a front is going through and I need the National Weather Service to tell me severe weather is possible? Right.

Some public events were canceled in surrounding communities.

That set off the chattering in the morning. By afternoon, co-workers were on their cell phones. They were checking their Internet. The front was in Eau Claire in the western part of Wisconsin. It was supposed to reach us by 3 p.m.

The front reached Marshfield. There was water in the streets. Ooh, water in the streets of a Wisconsin city in a rainstorm. Must be global warming.

People were deciding to go home early to ride out the storm there. The building started emptying.

At 3 p.m. no storm. I went out for my usual walk and the sun was shining. There were dark clouds to the west, but no biggie. It’s June in Wisconsin. When I came in I commented about the sunshine.

Never mind, the storm would reach us by 4 p.m. It didn’t.

By this point most everyone in my area had left. I was working on a World Coin News feature about coin collecting in Vietnam.

A person came around to check who was still in the building around 4:30. I certainly was. There were others. I walked toward photo scanning and found someone doing – guess what – talking on a cell phone.

Still no storm. About 10 minutes after 5 p.m. I finished up Vietnam and decided to go home. Guess what? Sunshine.

I went home. I rented a movie on the way across town at the Depot Street Station. If it is going to rain, I’ll watch a movie, I thought.

You know what? It didn’t rain in Iola at all. There was softball-size hail in Wisconsin Rapids 41 miles west, southwest of us. It was pea size in Stevens Point, 22 miles west. Some power lines were down. We lost the usual barn further north, though it was a pole building rather than the familiar red wooden structure. All in all, it was a typical late spring weather pattern.

How much work was lost in this state yesterday I don’t imagine we will ever know.

Remember the TV sitcom “Cheers?” My office is a little like that. Everybody knows my name.

There are advantages to being known. When I am covering an event, it can help to open doors, get a photograph or a quote that might otherwise not be available.

I remember my first days here when everybody didn’t know my name. I have worked with new staff who have telephoned people for a quote only to be told that they should do a little more research and then call back.

So, being known is an advantage.

It is also a disadvantage. No, I am not hounded by autograph seekers or stalking photographers. But I do get a lot of communications that come my way solely because my name seems to be the only thing the other party can think of.

I had a phone call Monday from a fellow who wants to buy the 2008 U.S. Coin Digest. He called me because my name is on the book and he wanted to know if the book had a hard cover. The sales materials said it had a hard cover, but he didn’t want to act on that information. He wanted to be personally assured that it had a hard cover. If it had a soft cover he would buy just one copy. For a hard cover, he would take three.

I could give him the information, but I cannot sell him the books. I am not in sales. I had to send him elsewhere.

Some readers send me their subscription problems. I can be sympathetic, but I cannot fix subscription problems. I can only send them to the subscription department.

None of this would be a particularly big deal except where time matters. I am not always here. Some people have sent their free weekly classified ads to me by name or by title. When I am out of town, they sometimes don’t get noticed or entered.

I have occasionally found checks in my mail when I have returned from a week away. They were mailed to me by name and that’s how the mail room routes it.

If you are in a hurry and want to do business with Numismatic News, contact the department you need the help from. While it is always nice to chat, where speed is essential, I am not the one to contact.

One of the tasks I perform is to edit each annual edition of North American Coins and Prices. I had a heads up from the promotions department to tell me that the staff was preparing material for the release of the 2008 edition of this reference book later this summer.

This will be the 17 edition, so you can see I have been at it awhile. Part of the process is to take a look at the prior edition to try to evaluate what I thought worked and what I thought I ought to follow up on to make the next edition even better.

My eye stopped on the special chapter that I created to introduce collectors to the American Buffalo one-ounce gold piece and its proof collector version.

In the chapter I recounted the opening of the sales period for the proof 2006 Buffalo coin.

“For six hours it was a fight for anyone to get through. In the first 24 hours, the Mint sold 50,000 of the new proof American Buffalo coins.”

The fight, of course, was to order the coins online. The Mint’s Web site, which is quite good, was strained by the onslaught of eager buyers.

This year, the onslaught didn’t occur. The numbers released by the Mint show that in roughly the first five days, which included the Memorial Day holiday weekend, just 9,700 of the 2007 proof Buffalo coins were sold.

In the first five days last year, the total ordered was 75,000 and in 10 days it had risen to 100,000. Those were incredible numbers. The Mint put the coin on sale and 10 days later, it had “persuaded” many collectors to send in $80 million to buy 100,000 one-ounce Buffalo proofs. That is an achievement to be proud of.

Lightning did not strike twice for the Buffalo program. Yogi Berra said it ain’t over ’til it’s over, so I will be eagerly monitoring the sales figures as they are generated from week to week. Join me in my Mint Statistics column in Numismatic News and see where we go from here.