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Charlie Hatton
Brookline, MA
Normally, I might apologize for posting a really short entry. But this is St. Patrick’s Day — on a Friday, too, for the love of redheads and potatoes and liquored-up coffee! And if I know my readers, most of them won’t be sobered up enough to read anything again until at least Monday. And I’ve got Guinness in the fridge awaiting my attention, so I’m mailing one in here. It happens.
So feel free to take the night off, too, and spend it celebrating the patron saint of leprechaun keggers everywhere.
(Which pretty much makes Saint Patrick the coolest saint of all, next to… well, Saint Pauli, naturally.
“Until the Catholics come up with a patron saint of bikini car washes, Pauli’s the man.”
I mean, Pauli’s got booze and girls. With pigtails! And lederhosen! That’s a tough combo to beat. Until the Catholics come up with a patron saint of bikini car washes, Pauli’s the man.)
You kids have fun tonight. I’ll see you on the other side. Cheers.
Permalink | No CommentsOh, cruel irony.
I wrote a few days ago — in jest, mind you — about needing an excuse to get out of work for the first weekend of March Madness this year. I don’t really want to shatter your image of my refreshingly sexy carefree and cavalier attitude, but I really was just joshing. Since college, I have exactly twice completely skipped out of work on the Thursday and/or Friday that kick off the NCAA basketball tourney. And when I did, I was up-front about it. I had fricking tickets to the Thursday games — once here in Boston, and once in Pittsburgh, so I would not be coming to work that day. And those Fridays… well, if the hoops hangovers didn’t do me in, then there’d be nineteen more hours or so of basketball to watch. So Friday was out, too. No cockamamie excuses for me, boyo.
So I was joking, really, when I brought it up earlier this week. I kid — I’m a kidder. It’s what I do.
But then, a funny thing happened. I actually did finagle a way out of work tomorrow (Friday). A perfectly reasonable, understandable, and justifiable reason to work from home. And it’s this — in our new office, I’ve been assigned to a cubicle. It’s one of ten or twelve cubes in a little ‘mini-cube farm’ on one side of our new building. No problem.
However, I also happen to be the first contact for certain types of people who are applying for jobs in our group. And I like to kick off the recruiting dance with a telephone screen. I find those sorts of conversations tell both parties about what they might be getting into, without the initial commitment and dressing-upness of a proper, in-person interview. It’s nice for both sides.
And it just so happens that I’ve got phone interviews scheduled for tomorrow. That’s just how it worked out. No, really — honest. Stop looking at me that way, dammit.
“The nirvana I joked about has fallen into my lap, and I’ve just found that it’s a mirage. A pipe dream, composed of solid teams and well-coached squads, and shooting guards who can actually hit an open three-pointer.”
Anyway, the upshot is, these sorts of conversations would be fairly uncomfortable, I’m thinking, to have in my open-ended, highly public cubicle. If I have the conversations at work, then everyone around me is going to hear the spiel of what we do, and here’s our sales pitch, and what do you bring to the table, and nobody wants that. Especially because I’m not always so terribly ‘smooth’ on the phone — I know, I know; ‘the hell, you say — get out!‘ — so who knows what I might end up saying, or claiming, or pretending our group can do?
‘What, time travel? Well, sure, we all work on the time travel machines over here. It’s old hat by now, really.‘
‘What’s that, cold fusion? Pffffft. Piece of cake. We even started doing fusion in the deep freezes in the cafeteria, just for the challenge. Nothing but a thing.‘
So clearly, it’s better if I have these conversations at home, with no one but the dog around to laugh at me.
(And the dog’s not even wearling pants, so how superior can she really think she is, right?
I mean, if I’m not wearing pants, it’s a conscious choice, If the dog is bottomless, it’s just because she’s got no opposable thumbs, and a brain the size of a chickpea. It’s completely different. No, really.)
Look, the point is — I’ve now got a perfectly good reason to stay at home tomorrow, and I’m taking it. Conducting private interviews, from the comfort of my own abode, is simply more advantageous for everyone involved.
But it did occur to me that I’d found an excuse to watch basketball, too — or at least sneak a few games in between interview calls. Without really meaning to, I’d devised an ingenious way to get to see most of the first round action happening on Friday. It just fell into my lap — really!
So you can imagine my dismay — nay, my profound heartbreak, disappointment, and heart-wrenching misery — when my favorite team, the one true team that I care about, the team I live and die with and fret over like a fragile nursing baby, LOST tonight, in their very first game.
My team. OUT. Buh-bye. Have a nice summer; see you next season.
Which means, I don’t frankly give a polkaing Pekinese posterior what the hell happens to any other fricking team for the rest of this lousy, time-wasting, poopy tournament. Teams win, teams lose — what do I care? I’d rather watch baseball, ya dinks.
(Yes, I’m a sore loser. And no, I don’t learn from the heartbreak year to year. Such is the plight of die-hard sports fans — ever-optimistic, but doomed to wallow in the wading pool of unmet expectations.
It’s a hard life. We don’t suffer quite as much as the Catholics, but only because we don’t keep at it year-round. Schedule March Madness once a week, like church trips, and we might give ’em a run for their money. The ‘Seven Deadly Sins’ have got nothing on a first-round loss to a team that never should have been in the Big Dance in the first place. Color me soulstricken.)
Anyway, now I’m in a most unenviable situation. I’m absolved of going to the office on Friday, but I still have to perform the phone interviews (that being the point, of course), and now I’m not even interested in waching basketball at all. The nirvana I joked about has fallen into my lap, and I’ve just found that it’s a mirage. A pipe dream, composed of solid teams and well-coached squads, and shooting guards who can actually hit an open three-pointer.
So, I suppose I’ll be good tomorrow. If I can’t enjoy the tournament, then I should at least dig the conversations with potential new people, and whatever else gets thrown at me in the process. But basketball? Dead to me! At least until next year.
Hardly makes working from home seem worth it, does it? And I’ll be vaguely cheering for underdogs the rest of the way out, but mostly to be a pain in the ass. My heart’s not really in it, and half the time, I’ve never heard of the team I’m supporting. It’s just what we do, once our teams bite the big orange dimpled one.
Screw this, man! Can I go to work on Saturday and Sunday, too? This tournament is OVER!
Permalink | 1 CommentThe NCAA basketball tournament starts in earnest tomorrow.
(I don’t recognize the ‘play-in game’ as being part of the shindig, really. Sure, it’s great for the team from an itty-bitty school that gets to play one more game before hanging up the jock straps for the season — but mostly, it was invented to squeeze a little more cash out of the fans for the event. Who ever started an elimination tourney with sixty-five teams, anyway?
Nobody, that’s who.)
“That’s a mascot I don’t want to see, I don’t need to see, and I’ve paid upwards of twenty bucks at a peep show specifically to see.”
The days between the bracket seeding announcement and the actual tournament are the most fun. Partly, that’s because the anticipation is often better than than whatever the wait is for. Partly, it’s because arguing over how Cincy got screwed over, and who at the Air Force Academy slipped steak dinners and hookers to the selection committee to get their team in, is always entertaining. Mostly, though, it’s because these are the precious few days when we can laugh and point at the postage stamp-sized schools from piddly little conferences that made it to the Big Dance. By Friday, one of those ‘nobodies’ will have knocked off our favorite team, ruined our brackets, and cost us fifty bucks in the office pool. We sure as hell won’t be laughing and pointing at them then.
So, we might as well laugh and point at them now.
(Karma? What is this ‘karma’ you speak of? Never heard of it.
Is that one of those Conference USA schools?)
Actually, I don’t want to laugh and point so much, because I’ve got very little information to laugh and point about. There are a dozen or so schools in the tourney this year that I know precious little about. Including, for instance, their mascots. I can rattle off the mascots for many of the major college teams, and I can tell you that there are, in this year’s festivities, four ‘Wildcats’, three each of ‘Panthers’ and ‘Tigers’, several ‘Eagles’, some ‘Quakers’, ‘Great Danes’, ‘Bulldogs’, and ‘Salukis’, ‘Hoyas’, ‘Aztecs’, ‘Golden Flashes’, and even a first-round ‘Bruins’-‘Bruins’ matchup that promises to be… well, a real grizzly of a game — for the underbear, at least.
(Did I just do that? ‘Underbear’? ‘Grizzly of a game’?
Lord help me, the March Madness must’ve already set in. I’m so ashamed.)
And don’t even get me started on the Wichita State Shockers. That’s a mascot I don’t want to see, I don’t need to see, and I’ve paid upwards of twenty bucks at a peep show specifically to see. How those kids can play ball with that going on is beyond me.
(If you don’t get any of that last bit, just keep moving. Don’t look it up or think too hard about any of it. I don’t want to be accused of contributing to the delinquency of anyone who’s not already there. Move it along, folks.)
Not knowing the mascots for many of these teams, I did what any curious, resourceful, possibly unstable sports fan would do: I made up new mascots for them. Sometimes more than one, when I couldn’t decide. Here’s my list of who I think is going to be playing this weekend — so now my bracket is way more interesting than yours. Jealous much?
Belmont Stakes
Bradley Fighting Vehicles
OR
Bradley DammitJanets! (Yes, it’s a Rocky Horror reference. Deal.)
Bucknell Buckaroos
Davidson Goliaths
OR
Davidson Lettermen (See, because they letter in basketball, and there’s David Letterman, and… yeah. It’s not that good. Moving on!)
George Washington Cherry Trees
OR
George Washington Bridges
OR
George Washington Carvers
Hampton Weekends
Iona BigHouses
OR
Iona FastCars
OR
Iona BaseballBattaNowIBreakaYouFaceas
OR
Iona Rosannadannas (No, it doesn’t quite fit — but who wouldn’t want a Gilda Radner mascot?)
Monmouth Cottonmouths
OR
Monmouth Monoliths
Oral Roberts I’mNotTouchingThisOneEvenIHaveMyLimits
Pacific Oceans
OR
Pacific Atlantics
OR
Pacific Gravities (Yes, it’s a lisping science nerd joke. I need professional help, really.)
Southern Comforts
OR
Southern Crosses
OR
Southern ManDon’tNeedHimAroundAnyhows
Permalink | 1 CommentI’m having a spat. A big one, with lots of screaming and profanity and stamping of little feet. All by me, of course, which is the norm in these little disagreements.
This particular spat is with my cell phone.
I say that the pictures I took with the phone camera last night (as evidence, to accompany a post about a narrowly-averted bit of idiocy in which I nearly engaged) are mine, and I should be able to email them to myself whenever the hell I please.
“Opposable thumbs, years of cell phone experience, and a brain the size of a C-cup boob, and what does it all get me? Nothing.”
The phone, however, has other ideas. The phone seems to think that it owns the pictures now, and has complete control over what happens to them. It firmly believes in its lunkheaded digibrain that it’s meeting me halfway, by letting me see the pictures, and save the pictures, and — in an unfortunate slip of the thumb — even delete one of the pictures, but not, under any circumstance, email the pictures to a device where I might actually do something useful with the pictures.
Further, the phone has taken up a policy whereby it will send itself a chirpy and thoroughly uncooperative text message each time I attempt to email said photos to myself:
‘Pictures Access Denied!‘
(My quotes, but the caps and exclamation point come from the phone. Cheeky little cuss.)
What I’ve ever done to the phone to deserve this sort of shunning is beyond me. I treat my phone right. It’s got the Liberty Bell March ringtone, and a custom screen image. I barely ever drop it, and I always wipe it clean after making 900-number calls. And I never — never, never, never — do that trick where you sit in the back row at a movie with the phone on vibrate tucked into your underwear, where you call yourself over and over on another cell phone’s speed dial. Never.
(And not because the phone was on speaker once when I got a real call, and a theater full of people heard my crotch shouting, ‘Hello? HELLO? ARE YOU THERE?!?‘
Well, not just because of that, anyway. But I’m not welcome at the Cineplex any more, I’m afraid.)
Still, this crappy little device with a brain the size of a nipple ring seems to have the upper hand for the moment. The pictures are somewhere within its bowels, and it’s not letting go without a fight. Of course, being the one in the fight with opposable thumbs, I didn’t go down quietly. I even pasted the text of the error message into Google, and found a few hits. There was even advice, with a very specific solution to my very problem. All I need to do is reset a piddling little security setting. How simple! Gosh!
Flushed, I thumbed through the menus on the phone, my victory clear and imminent. I made it to the security settings and found…
MY POOPY PHONE DOESN’T SMEGGING HAVE THAT STUPID PIDDLY LITTLE SECURITY FREAKING SETTING!
So, I’m back to square one. Opposable thumbs, years of cell phone experience, and a brain the size of a C-cup boob, and what does it all get me? Nothing. I’m still no closer to the pictures, or to the now-totally-not-worth-the-effort idiocy-averting post the pics were meant to illustrate. Instead, you get a dozen paragraphs telling you exactly how and why I’m not as smart as a three-inch piece of Mickey Mouse Sanyo electronicrap. Bitches!
Fuck it. If I don’t figure it out soon, I’ll take the damned phone apart to get at those pictures. That may not count as ‘winning’, but it’s sure as hell gonna feel good to let the hacksaw and vice grips loose on that thing. Toy with me, will ya?!
Permalink | 3 CommentsAh, spring is in the air. And that can only mean one thing.
No, not ‘love‘, ya doe-eyed mushbrain!
It means that it’s one of the two brief magical times of year when the grand sports of baseball and college basketball overlap. Sure, I love football as much as the next guy. And hockey’s fine, and golf’s okay, and holy frostbitten knees, wasn’t that Olympic curling just riveting?
(Answer: No, not so much. I’d sooner scan sumo matches for ‘wardrobe malfunctions’ than sit through another nine hours of ‘Shuffleboard on Ice’. But that’s just me. No Canadian blood, you see.
Not on the inside, anyway.)
My true sporting loves, though, are baseball and college hoops. And when they’re both in full swing and relevant (read: when my favorite team hasn’t tanked their way out of contention yet), it’s truly a magical time. There’s nothing quite so satisfying as filling out a ‘March Madness’ bracket on the same day you draft a fantasy baseball team.
(Where ‘nothing quite so satisfying as’ may be replaced at your discretion with:
Wishful thinking and poor draft strategy aside, though, the last two weeks of March are always a party. It doesn’t hurt that St. Patty’s Day is often stuffed into the first March Madness weekend, either. We’re gonna be cramming beer and bar food down our throats anyway; why not let the Irish take credit for a day? It’s all good.
“Our pocket protectors and taped-up Coke bottle glasses positively shudder in anticipation.”
The toughest thing about this time of year is coming up with yet another flimsy-but-plausible excuse to duck out of work during the first weekend of the basketball tourney. The games start on Thursday, but the weekend doesn’t kick off until Saturday. That’s definitely poor planning on someone’s part. I blame the ancient Sumerians, for coming up with a seven-day week in the first place. What, they never heard of metric? Lousy fricking Sumerians.
This year, I’ll have to be more creative than usual. In the past, when I switched jobs every couple of years, it was easy. I could have my tonsils ‘taken out’ over and over, or keep ‘killing off’ great-aunt Edna. But I’ve been in this office for more than two years now, and they’ve got a policy:
‘Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on us again. But fool us three times, and you’d better update your resume, bitch.‘
I paraphrased a little, from the employee handbook. But you get the point.
So I’m not sure what it’ll be this year. A ‘flooded basement’, perhaps, or a ‘locust infestation’? An ’emergency vasectomy’? ‘Demonic possession of a pet gerbil’? A bout of ‘forty-eight hour gangrene’? We’ll see. Meanwhile, I’ll make my picks and shell out my cash, in exchange for the right to get sloppy drunk and shout at other peoples’ TVs this weekend. That’ll be nice.
And then there’s baseball. True, the season hasn’t really kicked off yet, but this is high times for us fantasy nerds. The calculators are clacking with comparisons of three-year slugging averages versus spring training results against left-handed pitchers on Tuesdays in stadiums named after citrus fruits. Our pocket protectors and taped-up Coke bottle glasses positively shudder in anticipation.
In honor of the drafts in which I’m currently immersed — and to show that love really is in the air — I’ll close tonight by bringing you a fully-loaded, plausibly positioned, twenty-five man roster of:
Major League Baseball’s ‘All-Porn Star Names’ Team
Catcher: Raul Casanova
First Base: Jeff Bagwell
Second Base: Russ Johnson
Third Base: Michael Cuddyer
Shortstop: Pokey Reese
Left Field: Larry Bigbie
Center Field: Grady Sizemore
Right Field: B.J. Surhoff
Outfielder: Nook Logan
Outfielder: Terrence Long
Infielder: Nick Swisher
Catcher: Pete LaForest
Utility: J.J. Hardy
Starting Pitcher: Gary Glover
Starting Pitcher: Rich Harden
Starting Pitcher: Wandy RodrÃguez
Starting Pitcher: Woody Williams
Starting Pitcher: Kerry Wood
Reliever: Nate Bump
Reliever: Travis Chick
Reliever: R.A. Dickey
Reliever: Jimmy Gobble
Reliever: Buddy Groom
Reliever: J.J. Putz
Closer: B.J. Ryan
Now if we can just get Bobby Cox to manage the team, Jim Hickey as pitching coach, and Dick Pole as bench coach, then we’ll really be smoking the ball! So to speak. Ahem.
Who knew baseball could be so hot, eh? And this in a sport that has a coach tell you what to do when you reach ‘first base’, then sends you home once you get to ‘third’. Hardly seems fair, does it?
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