I’ve been interviewed numerous times, during my election bids (especially last time), for my metro site, and a few times about my editing Wikipedia.
I was interviewed by a local TV station while taking part in a pro-choice rally here in the early 1990s. “Why are you, as a dude, interested in abortion rights?” was the gist of it. A bunch of friends called me later to say they’d seen me on TV - and that I was surprisingly coherent. I was also once interviewed by the Plain Dealer, the big local paper, about some legal work I’d done on a domestic violence case. More recently I was interviewed, along with two friends, on a Franklin, Tenn. radio program about Civil War battlefield preservation.
I wrote some topical op-ed pieces while I was a reporter for my local paper, just before law school, that got some attention. That was cool.
And I got a shout-out on Star Trek: The Next Generation that others notice from time to time. I wrote to the staff to suggest a particular starship name, and staff writer Rene Echeverria (sp?) not only used the ship name, but named a nebula after me in the episode “Firstborn,” too.
Whoah… that was YOU?!
Time Magazine’s Person of the Year is You.
Sorry about the whales. Maybe they were in disguise. Anyway you did your best with the information you had.
My fifteen minutes may have been back when I was a minor local celebrity within the very active poetry scene in my (small) hometown, as a decent juvenile poet. If that was my lot, it’d be kind of funny to blow it out on that. 
My hometown’s great. It’s sort of like a teeny-tiny LA or something. If you ask someone what they do it’s “Well, this is my day job, but really, I’m a writer.”