Author: Rilaly

Influences: John Irving, Stephen King, Chuck Palahniuk, Raymond Carver, Larry David, David Bowie, Mike Patton, and Ayn Rand. Style: Short sentences, easily readable, and little in the way of description. Genre: Information, humor, and psychological interpretation.

Strange Officefellows

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We can’t choose our co-workers. The hierarchy not only chooses them for us, they choose who we sit near. If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know that you’re probably closer to the person you sit near than most of your family for as long as you sit near them. You can choose your friends and associates, but you can’t choose your family or your co-workers. Those of us who have been a part of a large, multi-national corporation, on a long-term basis, have found that the lines between family and co-workers often become blurred.

“There are times when we may find ourselves closer to our co-workers than our family, and the simple reason for this is that we’re around them more often,” a boss of mine once said.

In the course of our tenure at the firm, we will sit next to a wide variety of office workers who reveal their eccentricities over time. The ratio of odd ducks may not exceed those in the general public, but when we get to know them more intimately, it seems like it. When we switch to the overnight shift, we encounter a Star Wars Cantina of odd ducks on a nightly basis, and the attempts to overlook their eccentricities becomes their part-time job. We can try to ignore it and hope it goes away, because we have to work with these people at least forty hours a week. Forty hours a week doesn’t seem like a large block of time, until you’re doing everything you can to enjoy your day at work. Moderation is the key for if you become too sympathetic to their plight, to the point that you begin to believe that they’re all victims of circumstance, it may lead you to becoming one of them. The difficulty of maintaining objectivity is made all the more difficult by the players involved, and their unintended desire to top the most extreme eccentricity we’ve ever heard. If we manage to escape this exercise untainted, we will walk away from the experiences mumbling we can’t choose your co-workers.

The Office Party

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Rhonda told my girlfriend at the time, that she saw me at a bar that was well-known in our city for being a low-rent meat market. When my girlfriend confronted me with this, I told her “I’ve heard of it, but only because there’s a Dairy Queen across the street.” The next day, my girlfriend informed me that Rhonda stated that it wasn’t just that saw me there, she stated that the two of us engaged in a short but polite conversation. I reiterated the fact that I’d never been to that particular bar. When Rhonda later found out that there was another person working at our company who had the exact same name as mine, she conceded that it may have been a case of mistaken identity. I accepted this at face value, at first, until I chewed on it for a second.

“Wait a second, didn’t she say she had a conversation with me that night?” I asked. “How can one have a conversation with another and believe it’s someone else, based on their name? How drunk was she?” 

It’s important to note, here, that my relationship with Rhonda went beyond a name basis. The two of us spent three months working across the aisle from one another in the company. And … and those three months were her first three months with the company, and she had tons of questions, and I was the senior agent on that team whose primary duty it was to answer those questions. In these two respective roles, the two of us had over 100 exchanges in those three months.

“It’s not a case of mistaken identity,” I said. “She’s out to get me. She wants to break us up, or something.”

“Rhonda doesn’t think that way,” my girlfriend at the time stated. “It’s just Rhonda. She’s kind of a ditz. I’m embarrassed that I ever believed her over you. Forgive me?”

Of course I forgave her. How could I hold her responsible for another person’s fables and foibles? I didn’t forgive Rhonda however. I knew Rhonda was a bit of a ditz, but I wasn’t buying the “It’s just Rhonda,” excuse regarding the accusation she leveled against me, and I thought less of her and my girlfriend for believing her. I thought Rhonda was out to get me, and I carried that particular grudge against her for days, until I discussed the situation with Dan.

“It is just Rhonda,” Dan said to confirm my girlfriend’s characterization. “I can tell you all you need to know about Rhonda in one brief, little story. Rhonda found out that $600.00 was missing from her checking account, and she could not explain that missing money. She knew that she didn’t do it, and her daughter said that she didn’t withdraw the money either. Rhonda was so convinced that something nefarious was going on that she took her complaint up the corporate chain to the bank’s vice-president (VP). Once seated across from that seat of power, Rhonda proceeded to berate this woman for her bank’s apparent lack of security. ‘Do you just let anyone walk into your bank and withdraw money from various accounts?’ Rhonda asked the VP. In her portrayal of the conversation, Rhonda then proudly informed her audience that she informed the VP that the bank would be pulling all of the bank’s security tapes, and that it had become her mission in life to get her $600.00 back if it killed her, because she knew, knew that she didn’t do it, and she didn’t believe her daughter, the only other person with access to her account, did it. She stated that she would’ve remembered withdrawing $600.00, because $600.00 was all she had in that account, and her $500.00 rent was coming due, and she wouldn’t just withdraw her rent money for reasons she couldn’t remember. She informed the bank VP that she had nothing to show for that $600.00 withdrawal, and if she had been the one to withdraw the money she “sure as hell” would have had something to show for it. It was a serious charge, of course, and the VP told Rhonda that she considered it so serious that she would make it her top priority to find out what happened.

“The bank VP, being a responsible VP, responded to Rhonda’s complaints by pulling the bank’s tapes on the date and time of the withdrawal, and she called Rhonda in a couple days later to watch the tape and show her that it was, indeed, Rhonda withdrawing those funds.

“Now,” Dan continued. “I’m sure that that bank VP privately accused Rhonda of all the same ulterior motives that you just did two minutes ago, but the one thing neither of you account for is her stupidity, an inexplicable, almost unprecedented, embarrassing amount of utter stupidity that is just Rhonda.”

We’ve all heard about faulty eye-witness testimony that has led to some convictions, but when we read the shockingly high number of cases that were predicated on key eye-witness testimonies and later overturned with DNA evidence, we wonder if these people were lying. We can only guess that an overwhelming number of these eye-witnesses “Saw it with my own eyes.” Rhonda thought she saw me, and she was willing to go to battle over the idea that not only did she see me, she talked to me. When she found out this guy with my exact name, same spelling and everything, worked at our company, her faulty eye-witness testimony went into hyper drive. 

How often does our memory betray us? I could tell you a number of stories about my faulty memory on some life-altering events. You might be sympathetic when I reveal the details, or you might not. You might consider me just stupid, or you might suggest that I had motives for my poor memory in certain situations. How could you confuse such details? Was I trying to be more dramatic, funnier, or more interesting? No, I just messed up some details. It just seems impossible to believe that some memories are that bad, but some of them are, and as impossible as it is to believe faulty eye-witness testimony might play a role, some of the times it does, and we have to account for that.

A Reaction

I strolled into work one day to find Bill and Jim riding around on a guest’s sit down scooter in the back office of the front desk of a hotel. This scooter was motorized and very similar to that which can now be found at your neighborhood Walmart. Jim rode around on this motorized scooter, like a little kid with a new toy: laughing, beeping the little horn, and hooting, and hollering, and waving his pretend hat around like a cowboy in a rodeo.

“That’s hilarious,” I said watching Jim go crazy.

“Yeah,” Bill said. “Too bad there’s a limit to the fun … It’s an old lady’s cart, and it’s limited in how fast it will go.”

“Whaddya mean?” I asked Bill, as Jim began to dismount. “These things are universal. There’s no such thing as an old lady’s model. There’s an accelerator switch that goes from turtle to rabbit.” 

When it was my turn on the scooter, I turned the accelerator switch from turtle to rabbit. Just before I went on my first ride, I saw Bill and Jim’s imagination light up. I took one run through the back office to gain a little comfort with the scooter, and its new speed, and in my second run, I began yelling, “How do you stop this thing? I’m out of control.” I then crashed into one of the telephone operators that had been sitting in her chair.

The telephone operator’s initial alarm could not be faked, but as she read my face, her alarm softened. “Jack ass!” she said with the remnants of a smile lifting the corner of her mouth.

Bill and Jim were out of control with laughter. I thought of making a couple more runs. It was, indeed, a blast, but the performer in me couldn’t see how I could top the hilarity of first run, however, so I dismounted.

Bill replicated my run, when his turn arrived, by screaming the exact same words, “How do you stop this thing? I’m out of control,” and he ended up crashing into the exact same operator’s chair in the exact same manner.

“Look,” someone who just entered the back office area said when Bill was in the midst of his run. “Bill figured out how to make the scooter go faster.” The person who said this just happened to be the most attractive female employee in the hotel, and I had spent weeks trying to impress her. When Bill crashed into the very same operator’s chair as I had, she laughed hard and she said, “You are just crazy” in an affectionate manner.

“I did that,” I told Bill in a manner that I hoped would affect this girl’s impression of me. Bill stopped right in front of me, looked up and grinned. “I figured out that switch,” I said. “I made it go faster. I — you even ran into ran into the same operator’s chair in the exact same manner I did.” Bill just sat there and grinned up at me. I knew that declaring propriety of a joke was a fool’s errand, and as a result I didn’t do it often, but this woman was so good looking, and she laughed so hard that I couldn’t help but ask Bill for my proprietary interest back. He just sat there and smiled at me.

I got credit from the schlubs at the front desk, but when the best looking girl at the hotel stepped in the back office, she only saw Bill doing it. “You know I did that first,” I said like a five-year-old trying to reclaim a good boy deed. I hoped that this incredibly beautiful woman would hear this and know that I was the funny one here, and that Bill had just copied a run that led her to laughter. I didn’t care about schlub laughter. I wanted beautiful woman laughter.

Bill’s smile increased, until he was beaming at me. At one point, his beam increased to the point that he started to turn red. My competitive urges began to grow, until I began disliking this character named Bill. I never cared for Bill before this moment, but the two of us managed to have a working relationship with one another. This particular incident was just beyond the pale. He was the beneficiary of excellent timing though, and he knew it. When he continued to smile at me, and beam, and go red with glory, I considered the fact that I had underestimated how loathsome a creature he was, soaking up more than his share of glory. I was getting fired up, trying my hardest to look away. I was fighting the urge to call him a dirty name, at this point, and his prolonged, unusually long stare was only making me more angry. I imagined that this altercation might progress into something physical, when a third party stepped in to interrupt us:

“Okay Bill, settle down.” The third party then said in a very soothing voice, “You know you need to refrain from getting too excited.”

“What?” I asked the third party person. “What’s going on?”

“He’s having a seizure.”

The Mess

Standing behind the front desk of a hotel, a woman named Jenny asked a porter named Jack to clean up a small nugget of trash she saw in the foyer of the hotel. 

“Yuck, Jenny I think it’s poop,” Jack said leaning down to look at a small particle on the floor that was at the bottom of the ballroom announcement board.

“It’s not poop Jack,” Jenny replied. “Just clean it up.”

Jack went overboard. He insisted on it. He went into the back and grabbed a tissue. Jenny was somewhat frustrated by this, but she did not say a word as Jack collected the particle in front of the announcement board with a tissue and threw it in the trash can.

Minutes later, the front desk housekeeper began bending down to make quick dabs and wipes with a washcloth on the floor in front of the front desk area, and she proceeded to do this down the hall. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

“Someone spilled coffee on their way down the hall,” she said cleaning a trail of brown dots. “Happens all the time.”

Minutes later, a gift shop employee approached me saying, “I need you to accompany me out to a car.” What? “Just come on!” she said. “I’ll tell you outside.” At the car, she informed me that a guest knocked on the stall of the bathroom, asking the gift shop employee if she worked for the hotel. When the gift shop employee told her that she did, the guest informed her that she had had an accident. The guest asked the gift shop employee to go to her car and retrieve a coat for her. Fearing a lawsuit, or that this was some kind of ruse perpetuated by a guest who might claim that she stole something out of her car, the gift shop employee asked me to witness her going into the guest’s car for the guest’s coat. 

Unbeknownst to me at the time, the customer also asked the gift shop employee to retrieve a to-go shopping bag for her. Once the guest had her London Fog, knee-length coat on, sans the underwear and pants the guest now had in the to-go bag, the gift shop employee informed me, the guest decided to stop, en route to the exit. The guest proceeded to shop in the gift shop for a full fifteen minutes, “Like nothing happened,” the gift shop employee informed me. She was wearing a London Fog length coat that stretched to her knees, but she had nothing else on below the waist, due to the mess she was purported to have made in her undergarments and in her pants.

“She must be used to it,” the gift shop employee surmised.

The Obnoxious Email

One of my fellow email customer service agents quit the job that required her to answer emails from customers, because she couldn’t handle the swearing she encountered via the confrontational emails that she received.

“It’s an email,” I told her on numerous occasions. “Prior to this job,” I informed her, “I’ve experienced face to face confrontations with angry, swearing customers, and I’ve even had some of them throw things at me.” I informed her of some of the abusive phone calls I’ve taken over the years in which I’ve had my life threatened. “And these are just emails.” I told her that some customers will do everything they can to get under your skin and rattle you. “It’s the nature of the customer service industry,” I said. “Compared to a person trying to dress you down, face-to-face, and an irate customer that won’t let you get a word in with their less personal phone calls, an abusive emailer is nothing. It’s impersonal, and they know it. The anonymity allows them to think they can write anything, and it has no reflection on them. Just ignore it, and don’t take it personal.” I said the latter in a dismissive manner that suggested that once you get over this hump, you’ll be looking back on all of this with laughter.

“I can’t ignore it,” she said. “And to be quite honest, I don’t know how you all can?”

“Just laugh at their feeble attempts to prove that they’re mad,” I said the latter in a derisive tone that mocked their attempts to appear emotional via email. In my attempts to lead her into dismissing these silly people who get emotional in emails, I was informed that I was acting in a manner that she considered dismissive of her complaint. “It’s a mindset that you have to have in the customer service industry. Always remember that they don’t know who you are. They’re angry people who want to have something to be mad about. You’re just the unlucky person that happens to be on the other end of their rage. You’re an anonymous worker for the company. Their grievances aren’t with you, or even company. Their complaints are with the life fate has dealt them. In the end, be happy that you’re not them, and you don’t have to live with them, and that it’s just an email. Most of us have experienced a lot worse.”

“I couldn’t do it,” she said greeting me months later, after numerous counseling sessions. She was quitting the company. “I couldn’t ignore it,” she added. I couldn’t help but think less of her, as she told me how much my efforts to console her meant to her, and she said all that with tears in her eyes. To say that I was shocked does not do it justice.

From that point forward I took what I considered inconsequential complaints from fellow employees more serious, and I realized that we’re all different, and we all have different thresholds, and some of us define Darwin’s theories on natural selection and survival of the fittest better than others.

The Identifiable Characteristics Inherent in the Penis

Working in the intangible world, employees are often required to require some customers send the company a form of identification to prove their identity, if those customers hope to continue to do business with the company. In one of the replies to such a requirement, a customer sent an image of his penis. Next to the picture were the emboldened words, “This is me!” and an arrow pointing to the image. I’m not sure if this customer was sending a rebellious statement in regards to our company’s policies and procedures, or if he believed that this would fulfill our company’s requirement for identification.

Putting Down the Dog

Sitting next to a person for forty hours a week, can lead one to think that they know everything they want or need to know about their co-workers. Some are tempted to believe that they know that person better than that person’s family and friends do, but most of us know that this is a silly conceit, as it is impossible to know a person in such limited constraints. In the day-to-day interactions we have with them, however, we hear intimate details we believe they do not share with family and friends, and this can lead us to the temptation that we think we know them better.

The friend that led me to realize the limits of my powers of observation, informed me that she had to put the family dog put down over the course of the prior weekend. In the midst of my sympathetic response, she said:

“It’s a dog. You men get so attached to dogs. You’re all so ridiculous.” 

I agreed, and I made a joke about the inherent loyalty men have for a dog versus what they should have for a spouse. Unbeknownst to me, at the time, this otherwise meaningless joke changed the dynamics of our conversation. I only gained the full breadth of this change in hindsight, after her full confession was out. She laughed a little at that joke. She presumably considered that joke a statement of solidarity she and I shared on the issue. She opened up after that joke. 

“My husband’s so upset,” she said. “He thinks I did it, because the dog was messing all over the place.” 

“Well,” I said. “That’s grief. Maybe that’s how he’s dealing with it, by blaming you.” 

“No, he’s right,” she said, “but it wasn’t just one mess here and there. The dog was going all over the place. Every time I came home and opened my door, I smelled urine. Our whole house smelled like dog urine, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.” The look on my face affected hers. “I told him and told him to take care of it. I told him to train the dog better,” she expounded. “I told him that maybe he should race home, during his lunch hour, to let the dog out one more time, but he didn’t do it.”

A lengthy answer of this type requires repetition. Even if the listener heard everything the speaker said, they need the speaker to pull quote their answer. 

“Wait a second,” I said. “You said he was right. What was he right about?”

“I put the dog down,” she said. She then put a hand up to caution me against proceeding before she could answer in full. “But it was not an impulsive decision. This dog had been having trouble with its urinary tract for months. I told my husband to take care of it. He said he would, but he either wouldn’t or he didn’t, so I did.”

“Who are you?” I asked. When I asked this question, it was framed in the comedic rhythm that many sitcoms use to condemn another in a soft fashion and allows the target of the accusation an easy exit. She flinched in a manner that informed me that she might have never heard the joke delivered that way before. “What did you say to your husband’s accusations?” I asked her. 

“I told him that the vet said the dog suffered from some debilitating disease,” she said. “I can’t even remember what I said that disease was. I made something up.” She then laughed. 

Again, I heard everything she said, but in order to process this information my processing center required repetition. “What did the vet say the disease was?”

“There was no disease,” she repeated. Her tone was one of impatience, as if to suggest I wasn’t getting it. “The dog wasn’t suffering from a disease, and it did not have infections in the urinary tract. It was just old, and it couldn’t control its bladder anymore.”

Some writer’s discretion was involved here, as I did not include all the blank stares I offered this woman, as she detailed her weekend activities. In those blank stares, I characterized her through her actions. I considered her act so heartless that I couldn’t comprehend it, but I didn’t want to bore the reader with the innumerable blank stares I offered her. The next question I’m sure a reader might ask is why didn’t I call her out or condemn her action further. All I can say is that I thought I was being subjected to the ‘awful to the extreme’ joke. Women perform this joke more often than men for whatever reason, and I’ve fallen for the ‘awful to the extreme’ joke so often that I was on guard. I’ve condemned people for actions so completely that when they say, ‘I didn’t really put my dog down. I was joking. I cannot believe you would think that I would do something that awful … You can be so naïve some of the times,’ I felt like a fool for overreacting in such a manner, and I didn’t want to overreact in this situation. 

Another element that drove the stupor and prevented me from questioning her further was that I am constantly confronting new ‘awful to the extreme’ exaggerations of human compassion. I am amazed at the irrational compassion some people direct to alleged victims they’ve never met in life to the point that they believe some outrageous claims based on some form of emotional allegiance. My friend who put down her dog was so lacking in empathy that it was another hill for me to climb to understand how lacking in empathy some people are. I tried to understand, but I didn’t do that well in the time and place. I tried so hard that I asked her about this situation numerous times. I didn’t recognize how persistent I became to have her assure me that she was not joking, that it affected our relationship. I didn’t even know that she was avoiding me, until I asked her about it, again, and she said: 

“You really need to get past the whole dog issue.”

NFL Pregame Shows are Unwatchable

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It’s possible, as stated in the previous entry on this general topic, that the actual NFL game may never reach un-watchable status, but the various NFL pregame shows already have. They’re a joke, a constant joke after joke, that no one, other than the giggling hosts, find humorous. Overnight ratings for the three primary pregame shows were down an average of 11% in week one of the NFL (2014), and this trend will continue as they continue to move away from the strict commentary and specific analysis of the game to the jibber jabber that I assume is designed to entertain.

The Giggling
The Giggling

Core, NFL fans of a certain age remember a day when Brent Musburger’s NFL Today Show on CBS, ruled the roost in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s. This was the standard by which all shows, then and now, are measured. Those of of us who loved this show were irritated by family members who wanted to engage in family matters on Sundays, because they would interrupt our viewing. “But it’s not even game time?” they would say. It wasn’t, but we would tell them that we probably love the NFL today Show more than the games. 

The NFL Today Show was a tight, seamless, and informative production that was deemed by most core, NFL fans to be indispensable Sunday viewing. We all missed a few of their broadcasts of course, but the fact that we remember those instances should cement the value this show once had on our love of the game. The NFL Today show did not just add value to the game, for many of us it was the game. Some of the actual NFL games were boring compared to the production that the NFL Today staff, Irv Cross, the Miss America contestants, and Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder put together, and there was a segment of the American youth that couldn’t get enough of it. As covered in the previous entry on this topic, it is obvious that NFL fan is no longer the primary demographic for the NFL pregame shows.

As the decades passed, some NFL pregame broadcasts decided to capitalize on the fact that we couldn’t get enough of football talk, by giving us another hour. Another hour of nothing but football –and in one cable channel’s case two more hours*– was the premise of the promise. Two more hours of football talk before the fellas could even take the field? What red-blooded American, born and raised on football, would be against that? More is more, and more is always better, right? Plus, when the alternative programming, on Sunday, consists of political talk shows, bowling, fishing shows, and mass for the shut-ins, we should be watching right? What happened instead is that this NFL Junkie has actually decided to spend more time with his family.{1}

The eventual, and perhaps inevitable, conclusion that more is not always more, or better, was soon realized as these productions began adding more to make their show more for the specific intention of attracting more, beyond the core. The core, NFL fan is now showered with the dreaded human interest story, the stories that were once deemed the exclusive right of Oprah Winfrey and Ellen Degeneres. We are now inundated with stories that inform us that players are people too, and they have all the same hopes, fears, and dreams that we do. We are informed that some of them laugh a lot, and some of them cry. Some of them have sick children, and some of them engage in charitable activities that help out their local communities, and some of them have wives that can teach us twenty-three ways to reuse a banana peel for those NFL families that need to learn how to budget on an average 1.9 million dollar salary.

Once the dreaded human interest stories conclude, the NFL fan returns from the World Fishing Network to hear some football talk, and we hear playful, radio-lite banter that occurs between the bosom buddy hosts. We learn that these ex-jocks that aren’t afraid to provide us with some self-deprecating, zany anecdotes that will lead to further antics and hi-jinx. Some productions then provide segments that force their hosts to have Abbot and Costello-like adversarial relationships with recurring guests and more hi-jinx, with incessant giggling to follow. And if that isn’t enough, we get to see hot chicks tell us about the weather reports for each stadium, and the sideline reports that inevitably lead to more hi-jinx, antics, and banter.

When all these non-football, NFL-themed human interest segments finally conclude, and the NFL fan does receive some actual analysis of the game, they hear these ex-jocks deliver the least controversial, safest opinions they can find. Long gone are the Jimmy “The Greek” no holds barred opinions on a player’s actual ability to perform on a NFL level, and they are replaced by non-critical, safe, and positive opinions by ex-jocks not wanting to hurt a current NFL players’ feelings.

The ex-jocks, and one professional broadcaster, are then required to spend an inordinate amount of time focusing on those teams with a higher fan base. If the Dallas Cowboys fail to make the playoffs this year, it will be the fifth straight year they’ve failed to do so; if the Jets fail to make the playoffs this year, it will be the fourth straight year they’ve failed to do so; but if the Falcons do make the playoffs this year, it will be the fourth time in five years that they’ve made the playoffs. Yet, the ongoing focus of these shows concerns what the Cowboys and the Jets have to do to be competitive again. Dallas is America’s team, and the Jets have the broader market, but they have both sucked for some time now. They suck so bad that talk of them reveals the attempts these NFL pregame shows are making for what they are … unwatchable.

Howard Cosell often spoke of the degradation of his craft with the admission of ex-jocks in the broadcasting booth. That warning surprised me at the time, because I thought ex-jocks could deliver a unique perspective on the game. As the years passed, and I watched these ex-jocks deliver passionate, and well-rehearsed, analyses on the game, I realized that Cosell probably feared what we would all soon realize: just about anyone can do this.

The central character of these NFL pregame shows is often the professional broadcaster on staff, and he or she, often tosses the analysis portion of the segment to the ex-jock who delivers a passionate testimonial that centers around the idea that a quarterback’s job is to throw the ball to receivers, and that those receivers need to catch that ball. The offense will then need to run the ball to keep the defense off balance, and the defense needs to find a way to stop the offense. In the end, the analyst informs us, one team needs to score more points than the other. Anyone can deliver this message, in other words, and the average fans doesn’t care if they do it well, as long as their heroes –the former titans of the gridiron– do it.

Most core, NFL fans thought that extending a pregame broadcast to two-to-three hours would be an incredible plus, and it was … at first. It was, perhaps, inevitable that these broadcasts, and all of the people who know their demographics, would try to find a way to attract more demographics, and keep that audience longer, beyond a “just the facts ma’am” approach of a Bill Belichick to that which we have today. The extra hour(s) led to a need to cover the game in a different way, until it became about the giggling, and the infotainment, and the One Life to Live type segments with a little Oprah-lite commentary to follow. The core, NFL football watching audience that wanted mano y mano analysis proved not enough to fill a two-to-three-hour broadcast. It became redundant, and it led them to try and find ways to expand their show to attract more, beyond the core.

One has to have some sympathy for those who try to put these shows together in the age of the internet, and the thousands of sports talk radio shows that now populate the airwaves, based on the fact that by the time these shows are set to air, on Sunday, every game has been thoroughly analyzed from just about every possible angle anyone can think of, but the human interest/comedy/infotainment segments these pregame shows have developed to fill the time we once couldn’t get enough of, and they are now un-watchable.

*CBS Sports Network’s Other Pregame Show

{1}http://awfulannouncing.com/2014/aa-nfl-pregame-viewing-experiment-part-pregame- show.html

The NFL is Almost Unwatchable

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“Too Many Commercials!” “A Record Number of Flags Thrown!” “Too Many Instant Replays! “The Art of Defense is Over!”

There are other headlines in the National Football League (NFL), but those headlines have the league tottering.

The NFL is still enjoyable for me, thanks to the technological invention of the DVR, but it’s tottering on the brink of unwatchable. My current routine NFL viewing habits involve me taping the game and waiting 45 minutes to an hour before watching the game. This time allotment usually allows me to skip the inane gibber-gabber in the pregame analysis, most of the commercials, and the time it takes for an official to review all of the instant replays in the game now. The latter often involves the broadcast network filling that time by replaying the play in question about 15 to 20 times. If you are still an NFL fan, and you don’t have a DVR, I have no idea how you maintain peak interest. On those occasions when I go to a friend’s house, we usually talk through those delays, until we eventually lose track of the game as it plays in the background. “Touchdown?” we ask. “Did they just score? Is it 17-3? We just missed a quarter of the game.” I have to imagine that the current NFL is grateful for the technological innovation, for if it weren’t for the DVR, I probably wouldn’t be watching anymore.    penalty_flag

Although NFL referees are the face of the problem for the current rise in penalties, they are just following the orders. Those orders are sent down by the the NFL’s Competition Committee (NFLCC). The referees are equivalent to police officers on the street. We blame police officers for the laws they enforce, but it’s our representatives often seated in state legislatures who write and pass those laws the police are employed to enforce. The referees, like the police, are the faces we see enforcing those rules/laws.

The NFLCC was set up to make the game more fair, to protect the players, and to create rules that they think will make the game more popular, such as freeing up offenses to score points. The NFLCC might be the most powerful body of people, controlling what the audience sees on the field. The NFLCC is comprised of representatives from eight different teams, and they are team owners, general managers, presidents, and one coach. They are a reactionary body who pass edicts down to referees. If the NFLCC believes that the offense is holding too often or the defense is getting away with pass interference too often, for example, the audience should expect to see a flurry of flags to try to curb the activity in question in the week that follows.

The NFLCC also tries to find creative and inventive ways to make the NFL a pass-friendly league to the point that quarterbacks (QB) and wide receivers (WR) are now breaking every record on the books. The creative and inventive methods that they once used to tweak the game are now becoming so blatant that it’s obvious to every core, NFL fan that the competition committee doesn’t just want a more pass-friendly league. They want what the cornerback for the San Francisco 49ers, Richard Sherman once called “A more fantasy-friendly league.”

The NFLCC has proven reactionary in some cases, and when they realize that they’re perceived as too friendly to the offense, they call for officials to ramp up offensive pass interference calls, hands to the face calls on the offensive linemen, and defensive holding calls on defensive lineman. To rectify a perceived, situational unfairness, their default position is to call for more penalties. Their goal, I can only presume, is to have as many penalties called on the offense as the defense, but the end result is more penalties.

We should note that with few exceptions most that the penalties being called by today’s referees are not new, but that there is a greater concentration, based on certain points of emphasis, than there were in any of the previous years. Some of them, usually the game’s announcers, defend these new penalties in ways we core, NFL fans find incomprehensible. Most of the coaches in the NFL also call for more replays on more plays, and more penalties, and the only casualty is the game and the fans.

The network announcers are supposed to represent the voice of the fan, but when another yellow flag lands on the field, we usually hear the announcers say something along the lines of, “… and guess what … another flag.” This, essentially, puts the blame on the player who committed the infraction. Yet, when we view the replay of the infraction, we often see a questionable infraction that suggests that the current NFL referee now defaults to throwing a flag. We can only assume that the points an NFL official accrues throughout a week favor a call, however questionable, over a missed call. If I were an announcer, the audience of the broadcast would tire of my “let them play” cries.

The current NFL and college football announcers decry the rare penalties in-game officials miss. “You want more penalties?” I want to scream at the screen. “Who do you represent in this call for more penalties, because I know it’s not me.” I’ve reached a point, a point near no return, where I no longer care if an official misses a call against even my favorite team, if the alternative means another yellow flag. I no longer take any joy from a penalty against the opposition that awards my favorite team a first down. These are relatively new concepts for me, but I’m sick of it. I’m sick of all of the penalties, and I just want the NFLCC to loosen these restrictions up and let the players on the field play some football.

The calls for instant replay are also becoming absolutely ridiculous. I fast-forwarded through a call for an instant reply, the cut to a commercial, and the follow up decision, and I calculated an eight minute span. That time-span occurred on two different occasions in the same game, and that occurred during a rare circumstance where I actually documented the time-span. The other ten to twenty calls for a replay weren’t that long, but I don’t know how other viewers can maintain peak interest in a game that is broken up with such lengthy breaks?

Certain Points of Emphasis

While it may be true that these are not new penalties, no one can argue that these new points of emphasis on some rules have led to more penalties being called, more confusion regarding the consistency of those calls, and more delays in the game. The resultant complaint, as evidenced by Richard Sherman’s, is that the league has turned its officials against the once beloved art of defense.

Most defenses do not have a Richard Sherman, or an Aquib Talib, who can play hands-off and still cover a top receiver, so most defenses have little-to-no hope of stopping the league’s high powered offenses. To rectify this perception, the competition committee put in other points of emphasis to ostensibly level the playing field. Rather than narrow the definition of illegal contact, beyond five yards, they instituted a point of emphasis on offensive pass interference, and pick plays, which has led to led to more penalties being called, more confusion on the inconsistency of those calls, and more delays in the game.

This has all led to the perception that a penalty is called on just about every series of downs, which statistically it is not, but perception beats reality in most cases. It has also led to what seems like a penalty on just about every passing play, which again is not statistically true, but perception beats reality. It has led the game’s greatest fans from the dramatic anticipation of: “Is he, or isn’t he, going to catch that pass?” to “Is he, or isn’t he, going to throw a flag?”

“All your life you grow up saying I’m only going to call a foul if it creates an advantage,” said former official, and former Senior Director of officials, Mike Pereira. “You can’t look at it that way anymore. Any contact, it’s a foul.”

The old saying that the best referees in the game are the ones that you don’t remember when the game is over, is now out the window. Referees now affect drives with their new “When in doubt, throw the flag” modus operandi, and the way the game is played, and ultimately the outcomes of some games. Anyone who doubts this change, need only look to the broadcasting booth where just about every major broadcasting now has a go-to-guy, former referee to help analyze and explain the calls that are being made on the field.

“The officials may take the heat (for this),” Mike Pereira said in an interview with UT San Diego, “But the heat should go to the (NFL’s) Competition Committee. Why do they keep doing this? There already was a league record for most point scored.

“The players will have to adjust, not the officials.”{1}

One of the many enjoyable aspects of watching sports is the historical comparison between athletes of another era. Was Drew Brees as good, or better, than Joe Montana, was Ben Roethlisberger as good as John Elway, is Peyton Manning as good, or better, than Dan Marino or Johnny Unitas? NFL game announcers now speak of current QBs and WRs breaking those old records held by Hall of Fame players. No one cares anymore, in much the same way no one cared about the Major League Baseball (MLB) records that were broken at the turn of the millennium, during the steroid years. Most of those MLB records —the home run records in particular— mean nothing now, and the NFL’s passing yardage, touchdowns, and receptions now carry the same asterisks in the minds of the core NFL fans of the future. “The game is different now,” old NFL fans now tell new ones that claim that current players are just better now. “You just cannot compare them line by line anymore.”

Drew Brees was a great, future Hall of Fame quarterback, but was he that much better than Joe Montana? To a young, NFL fan Drew Brees threw for over 80,000 yards. Montana threw for a measly 40,000 yards. Brees played for 20, largely injury-free seasons, Joe Montana played for 15 years, and his latter years were riddled with season-ending injuries. To that young, NFL fan, Brees was two times better than Montana.

The NFL does not have the rich, century old history of the MLB, and it never will. The popularity of NFL has never been as reliant on records, stats, or historical comparisons, but even its relatively newer, and less pertinent, traditions are being eviscerated through the points of emphasis that now foster a pass-friendly, fantasy-friendly game that breaks records on an almost weekly basis. We all saw what happened to the MLB, when they began desperately tinkering with their game (post-strike) to attract a broader audience, but the powers that be in the NFL seem oblivious to the aftermath that results from all that tinkering.

The idea that the NFL might follow the MLB down the path to total unwatchability seems improbable, as the game has never been more popular. As the NFL institutes on field and off field bells and whistles to broaden the base, the indispensable base is starting to think the NFL views them as dispensable. We’ve burned through a number of DVRs fast forwarding through the pregame commentaries that focus on non-game related activities, and the commercials and replays that test the fan’s endurance. Some of us even go so far as to turn the volume down during a game, so we don’t have to hear commentary from the broadcaster’s chosen analyst defend referees, the NFLCC, and rules in general. We try very hard to ignore the new aspects of the game we don’t care for in favor of those we do, but the NFL is making this more difficult with every passing year. Even while we grumble, however, we have some sympathy for those placed in the impossible place of trying to appease Vegas gamblers, fantasy football players, and all of the people all of the time, but when they stoop to please the others too often the core NFL might reach that point of estrangement that they consider the game unwatchable.