Things We Hate - Working on Sports Christmas

Working sucks. Working on two days which, by all accounts, should be a national holiday, really blows. The first round of March Madness (yes, the real first round not those awful games on Tuesday and Wednesday they tried to pass off. If they were the first round, what kind of tournament gives 60 out of 68 teams 1st round byes?) is our Sports Christmas and like any good holiday, we don't see why we should have to work. Fortunately for us, for the past several years, we'd managed, through a combination of various types of creative scheduling and deception to be home on one of both of these days. Yeah, that's right, we'd take the day off and it was awesome.

People always seemed to think that we're crazy, but why take your job, and yourself, so seriously that the idea of using a vacation day to watch a virtual orgy of college basketball is ridiculous? (Counterpoint: See Us, Unemployed) That's what vacation days are for. The only difference between taking off a week in the summer to go to the beach or taking the week off after Christmas to bask in the glow our you're excesses is admitting that you love sports that much. It makes perfect sense to us and if you don't get it, well, we don't get you.

Anyway, our streak has come to an end this year due to our need to avoid not getting paid (another tremendous downside of the non-salaried life) so we're here missing out on the chance to take full advantage of the first real innovation in tournament coverage we can remember. For the longest time, due to the overlapping schedules, watching first round could be extremely frustrating as the choice of games came at te whim of some know-nothing CBS producer. That often lead to us being forced to endure a blow-out performance from a rating giant like Duke or Kentucky or a local darling like Villanova instead of getting a comparatively less flashy but more compelling match-up with upset potential. Everyone knew we all watched for upsets, everyone except CBS apparently. Now, with all the games on 3 different channels (plus TruTV which really isn't a channel, though we enjoyed Jim Nance's tight ass doing promos for "Hardcore Pawn."), we could have seen them all!! Alas, instead of being a master of the NCAA universe, we're here. In our cubicle. Redacting pronouns. Living the dream.

Our only saving grace this year is March Madness On Demand. While it's not quite the same experience as being at home, it's still pretty cool. We're especially enjoying being forced to watch the same six commercials over and over again (Rental Cars and Rusted Root - what a combo!!), the 3 second lag between the audio and video and the concussion-inducing, Cloverfield camera work. If there's every a buzzer beater, not only will it be spoiled by the unsynched audio but we'll be laid up in bed for a week trying to recover from watching it. The other premium feature of MMOD is the ever popular, handy-dandy "Boss Button." The "Boss Button" allows you, the slacking worker, to click a button and pull up a bizarro version of Microsoft Outlook (only if Bizarro was black) that hides the player. To further your clandestine efforts, it comes complete with fake emails from the CMO (Chief Madness Officer, of course) discussing the excitement of the "First Four" and giving you tips on avoiding being caught watching hoops at work. Some might say that making it so obviously fake defeats the purpose but, we say why miss an opportunity to advertise? Speaking of advertising, the boss button is, of course, disabled during commercials so if your boss happens to walk by during the 73% of the time those commercials are on, while he won't think your watching basketball, he will think you're an asshole who sits around watching Coke Zero commercials.

In closing, yes, we are just bitter.

On a side note, we were going to scan and post our bracket because .... because ... you might care? We never got around, sparing us the embarrassment of having everyone see we picked Gonzaga to the Elite Eight for the 37th straight year, but we will say that we found it strangely unavoidable to pick all four #1's to reach Houston, Kansas to win it all by beating Ohio State (despite our better judgment and, if Kyrie Irving comes back, Duke to repeat) and much like everyone else in the world we like Utah St, Richmond, Gonzaga and maybe Belmont for upsets. It'll never happen but, as we've learned, most of what we predict never happens anyway. At least, at this time of year, when we're wrong it's fun anyway.