Angie Dezelske, Overheard in Minneapolis

Here’s a question to ponder: How much more productive would Minnesota workers be if we weren’t all logging in every day to Overheard in Minneapolis? The person responsible for those thousands of hours of slack time is Angie Dezelske, a state government worker from St. Paul who runs the popular site (on her own time).

The local version is a spinoff (though unconnected) of the original Overheard in New York site, where citizens submit snippets of strange and silly conversations they hear in public.

Dezelske came to be the caretaker of the Minnesota version almost offhandedly. She and a friend were discussing the New York site and just thought it would be fun to start one here. On a whim, she applied for the domain name in July 2006. “It was really very spur of the moment,” Dezelske says.

Overheard in Minneapolis is now visited by 25,000 readers a month. So what accounts for its popularity?

“There’s just very hilarious things that come out of people’s mouths while they’re in public. Some people choose to turn off their personal filter when they walk out the door,” she says. “I definitely think most people can laugh at other people’s misery, or their stupidity, or naivete. We’re all guilty of it, but I think to laugh at it is human nature.”

The humor isn’t exactly universal, though. Dezelske says she sees a real difference between the Minneapolis and New York sites. “The submissions I get aren’t as vulgar or as crazy,” she says. “I think sometimes you have to be a Minnesotan to understand them.”