March Madness Office Crack

This just in: The NCAA Tournament will cost businesses $1.7 billion this year (brought to you, this year, by Chicago-based placement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc.) Maybe they should be finding people jobs instead of doing this study. Who hasn't read this in any of the past 10 years? No one. Therefore, I'm not going to write about it.

But what I am going to write about, is the working atmosphere on the first day of the NCAA Tournament. The tournament pool is like crack. You have people wandering around with their brackets doing things they'd never do on a normal work day. Sending faxes. Giving coworkers money. Pulling their brackets out of a sleeve or pockets and handing them off secretively. I spent Monday through Wednesday thinking that there wasn't a pool in my workplace; I was so disappointed considering just how many people work there. Then at about 11:30am, one of my officemates shouts out of the blue, "I forgot to pick my brackets! How long until the first game?!" The first thing I said, within about 0.2 seconds, was, "50 minutes. You have time," and then I said, "Wait a minute... is there a pool here?" Turns out there was, but no one speaks of it. So you had to be in the secret club to know who to turn it into.

Anyway, I got my brackets turned in and became a member of the secret club. Then I proceeded to miss most of the first wave of games, so I guess that's another correlation to crack: money spent for a short term high.