Life During Wartime

If someone asked about the biggest changes in the world during my twenty nine years of life, I would point to last night.

h42-175x300I had to work, so I recorded Game 4 between the Celtics and Heat. The plan was to avoid contact with the sports world so that I had no idea of the outcome when I sat down to watch at 2 am. As a bartender this isn’t easy. People are always coming in off the street and you never know when one of them is going to inadvertently spill the beans as you shake their martini. But since where I work on Mondays isn’t a sports bar, there are no TVs, and our clientele isn’t usual rowdy sports fans with jerseys and hats on, I was confident that I could do it.

I warned my bar back Will, who like me is a big sports fan, not to talk about the game. I explained the situation and promised to knee cap him if he opened his mouth.

With my bases covered in the bar, I turned my attention to my phone. For one night I was nostalgic for my old Nokia that didn’t come with Internet, Twitter, and Facebook. I sent out over a dozen text messages to people, mostly friends but some who I knew would love to rub it in if the Celtics were getting killed, telling them not to send any updates.

Then I instructed my brothers to do the same. One brother said “I won’t tell u anything.” The other, who by the way is much, much older, responded “Ha, I am going to bomb updates at you every minute.”

“I’ll bomb your house while you sleep” I calmly replied.

I was waging a one night war against technology and felt that I was prepared. After scanning my contact list one last time, to make sure I hadn’t over looked anyone who might pose a threat, I secured myself in my update free fox hole behind the bar.

The only wild card was the customers. While we didn’t draw many sports fans, most of the customers are on dates or in large groups before or after dinner, there is always the chance that some drunk ass clown comes in talking about ‘The greatest game they had ever seen’. As I poured drinks, my awareness of new customers was at Yellow (hey if the government doesn’t want to use them anymore they’re fair game right?). Years behind a bar has helped me learn a lot about someone from the first few seconds they are in a bar. Anyone who was deemed a potential threat was stereotyped like they it was 2003 and they had a beard and a turban.

“Wait, before you sit down, please don’t say anything about the basketball game. Not a word. Ok, thanks. Now, would you like to have a look at the cocktail list?”

I didn’t care if it made me seem crazy. People do crazy things during wartime.

Around ten o’clock a message from my friend Sean popped up on my phone. I panicked. I had forgotten about Sean. He wasn’t a Celtics or Heat fan, but he was a sports fan and would definitely not be above needling me if the game wasn’t going very well for Boston. Especially if he had a few pops in him. I opened the message like it was a landmine that would leave my plans in rubble, scanning it for any key words before deeming it safe to read.

Turns out Sean and his girlfriend had gotten engaged.

My adrenaline was going now. There were only a few more hours to go and I was beginning to think that this was actually going to work.

Two and half hours later, when work was over and I was on my way home to watch the game, I felt an odd, but very real sense of accomplishment at having kept technology at bay. The Celtics ended up losing in overtime, but I had been able to sweat the whole game untainted by knowing the final score.

It had taken a concerted effort by no fewer than twelve people to keep me in the dark about the outcome of the game. There had been numerous messages, conversations, and some serious mental discipline required to make it happen. Today, even after all that, a state of technological deprivation is so fragile that it takes constant vigilance to ensure its integrity.

One of the biggest changes in my lifetime is that technology has made it more work to not know something, than to know about it within seconds of it occurring.

Technology also allowed me to DVR the game, and watch it commercial free when I got home.

You take the good, you take the bad….

—–Corey

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