Sports and Me

Something came to me last night as I watched two Hurricanes players streak down the rink toward the Edmonton Oilers' empty net and score with about a minute to play in the 7th game of the Stanley Cup Finals. As the puck hit the net, I knew then that the Carolina Hurricanes had won the Stanley Cup - the first North Carolina professional sports franchise ever to win a champoinship. At the same time, I realized, for the first time, that all the years I've thought I was a cursed sports fan were an illusion (or an allusion, given my penchant for stand-up comedy acts performed in the living rooms of others).

I used to dwell on all the NCAA basketball championship games that UNC should have won that they didn't; all the chances the UNC football team had to beat a ranked opponent to crack the Top 10 that ended in embarassing defeat; all the Super Bowls where the other team won; all the World Series games that the NL champion Braves have lost to wild card teams; all the times that Duke has beaten a favorite team and convince myself that I was doomed to pull for sports failures. Like my father, I could happily recount numerous games where the team I followed was either crushed mercilessly by its opponent or other games where my team (or player, in the case of tennis) seemingly had the win in the bag only to blow it in the last quarter or last inning or last 4 minutes of the half, or the last set, depending on the game. With that recounting came a certain satisfaction - it's easier to be funny (my goal is to have "She was funny" put on my tombstone) when you're talking about a loss or losses at the hands of the enemy.

As I settled down to watch the local news coverage after the game to see if the celebration in Raleigh was anything like the celebration in Atlanta, when the Braves won the World Series, I remembered that I had actually been in the home town or home state of championship winners more than once. In 1979, I was in the stands at the Gator Bowl when UNC upset Michigan. I was in Chapel Hill and a senior at UNC when Dean Smith won his first National Championship in 1982 with the storied team that featured Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Sam Perkins, and Jimmy Black, among others. That same year, I drove to Charlottesville, VA, to watch the UNC Men's Lacrosse Team beat Johns Hopkins and win the NCAA Men's Lacrosse title. I was in North Carolina in 1983 when State won the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament and still there in 1993 when UNC won again in 1993. I drove to Atlanta in early 1992 and watched UNC beat Mississippi State in the Peach Bowl. I lived in Atlanta when the Braves won the World Series (I've been a Braves fan since I was a little girl, because they were as close to a home team that the National League had for a North Carolina resident - the Orioles were out of the question because they were in the AL) in 1995. I should have been in North Carolina when UNC won the NCAA Baskteball championship again in 2005, but was actually in Peru due to an airline snafu.

Now, in 2006, I was a mere 7 miles away from the site where the Carolina Hurricanes won the Stanley Cup and last night, I asked myself (after spending most of the game trying to follow superstitions so that I wouldn't jinx the team) why I thought I wasn't one of the luckiest sports fans in the world. Okay, maybe someone who was born in 1960 and who's pulled for the Dallas Cowboys or the UCLA basketball team all their lives might be seen as a luckier fan. But, somehow, I think that I'm more fortunate because I've pulled for teams that have overcome embarassing losing seasons to rise to the top. I'm going to try to enjoy the moments of glory my teams have earned over the years. I'm sure I can find some other way to be funny - such as discussing my boyfriend's compulsions. Of course, if UNC blows it in the College World Series this year, I might forget all this.....

My Unpaid Office Assistants

My sister has started a blog that is devoted to telecommuting. She's decided to chronicle her first year as an official telecommuter. She's heard all kinds of things about whether you can telecommute and succeed, with most "experts" weighing in with the opinion (all they probably state their "opinions" as if they were facts - a disturbing trend that has created an entire news network devoted to stating opinions as "facts" - Fox News, or Faux News as the members of the Democratic Underground are wont to call it) that someone who telecommutes can't manage work or people as well as someone in an office. These experts, I firmly believe, are the same experts that announced (1) that using rock/Top 40 music in commercials would not be successful; (2) that there was no future for home PCs; (3) that Voice Over IP had too many problems to ever be a reliable method of sending voice over networks; (4) that no one will buy hybrid cars; (5) that if you are a mother and a career woman, both your parenting and career suffer because you can only do one thing in life well; and (6) that a college-educated, single woman in her 40s is unlikely to marry. In other words, they are people who are paid by fearful old men (and yes, I mean men) to promote Luddite and other antiquated philosophies.

So, I commented on my sister's blog that I'd been telecommuting on and off for six years and steadily for the last three years and that I'd managed to be quite successful at it. In my comment, I noted that I had three unpaid feline office assistants who did not talk behind my back about me at the office cooler. I thought it would be fun to write a little more about these assistants: Michiru (affectionately called "Sausage" because of her girth), Ping, and Finn.

Since I am the primary food provider at our house and I have a propensity for disappearing from said house for up to as many as three weeks at a time, when I'm at home, they've decided that they need to keep an eye on me as much as possible. Ping has the most rigorous duty in this respect. He follows me from room to room and can wear himself out if I happen to be cleaning the house. Fortunately for him, I don't clean the house as often as I work in my home office, which is fitted with a huge U-shaped desk and three computers (two laptops flank a Dell PC). There is still plenty of room on each side of the laptop for a huge, fluffy cat to lie down. (Ping is our biggest cat and he looks like he's a Maine Coon with lots of fur and a huge, bushy tail). Depending on the season, I tend to favor one laptop over the other. From October of any given year to March of the next, I work on an IBM laptop. So, Ping lies down to the left of the laptop, effectively blocking the fan. So, eventually, the poor laptop gets hot and shuts down to prevent damage. This usually happens while I'm in the middle of frantically trying to edit 7o or more pages in a Framemaker file.

From April to September, I usually work on the Compaq laptop and Ping lies in the space to the right of the laptop, generally knocking any papers I might be using for work to the floor if he happens to decide they're in the way. Fortunately, the fan is not located there. However, Ping lies with his huge tail either draped over the mouse or the keyboard. If I try to use either, he starts swishing the tail angrily. Eventually, he'll get up and walk across all the keyboards on all computers to go lie somewhere else (like the top of my defunct flatbed scanner/printer/fax that the cats ruined or the chair in front of my daughters' computer) for about 5 - 20 minutes before he returns. Or, he'll lie in the space behind the Compaq laptop and sulk, tail still swishing.

Sausage's responsiblity is more hostile monitoring of my work. I have a two-door wooden cabinet to the right of the U-shaped desk that I use to hide stacks of papers that I think might be important but don't want to look at. On the top is my collection of computer paper, my backup CDs, and office envelopes. She'll leap on top of the cabinet, knocking and crumpling paper or boxes that might be in her way to the ground, usually behind the cabinet, and settle herself in the tiny space between the computer paper and the box of envelopes. She'll sit there staring at me unnervingly for some time before going to sleep. She also firmly believes that the best way to get to that cabinet is to start by leaping on the flatbed scanner/printer/fax and walking across all three keyboards and using the operational printer to leap onto the cabinet. Michiru has also designated herself as the "Enough is enough" monitor and from time to time, she'll take actions to try to stop my work if she thinks I'm spending too much time in the office. Last summer, this entailed vomiting all over my IBM laptop while I was away for a weekend. The result of that was that the computer wouldn't turn on. When I tried to send it back to IBM to be fixed, they announced that they couldn't touch it because it was now a "biohazard." They issued me a new one and required that I send the computer back to the land of dangerous IBM laptops. I asked my boss if he thought I should obtain one of those "biohazardous" zip lock bags from my doctor and wrap the laptop in it. He said he didn't think I needed to go to such extreme measures.

Finn is a relatively new member of the family, having been adopted in October 2005 as a kitten. Since he is still learning how to be a cat, Ping and Michiru are his mentors and he's a very fine apprentice. His job is to protect my feet when I'm in the office. To do this, he goes under my desk and attacks my power strip and cable modem, because, apparently, cable modems and power strips become dangerous in the period from dark until dawn and they have to be beaten into submission each morning. As a result, sometimes the power to all my computers is shut down or I suddenly start getting dire warning from my laptops that "a network cable is unplugged." After the power strip and modem are sufficiently subdued, he curls up next to the cable modem for a short nap. Eventually, since the now harmless modem has been convinced to behave itself, he moves to the sofa and naps there until he decides it's time to go upset the birds and meows to go outside.

You're probably thinking, "What a sap this woman is. Obviously, she's one of those loonies who lets her cats run all over her. Why doesn't she just close her office door and prevent the cats from coming in?" Well, the answer to this question is that my home office is attached to the utility room/bathroom where we keep the cat food and litter boxes. They have to go through my office to get to those important items--actually, the food bowls are critical; the litter boxes are some sort of playground where the game is to move all the cat litter from the box to the floor. We've installed a cat door in the door between my office and the utility room because otherwise our dog goes in there and eats all the cat food out of their bowls (this is the same dog that can't eat out of her real food bowl - she has to carry the food in her mouth to another room, drop it on the priceless oriental carpet and eat only the bits she likes, leaving the rest, but the dog is a different story for another time). So, I can't lock the cats in there, either.

I also can't put the cats outside, even though they're indoor/outdoor cats. There is a door to the backyard in my office, and it's a very nice wooden door with beveled panels and nine panes of glass. The height of the panels before giving way to the glass panes is the perfect height for cats to leap up and dig their claws into so that they're hanging onto the bottom panels of the bottom row of glass panes. From that position, they meow frantically, scrabbling to stay hooked to the panels. Their meows sound exactly like the meows of a cat that has been horribly injured in a fight or by a car and they get progressively louder and more insistent as time goes by and I haven't let them in. Of course, at first Finn thought this was just a fun game to play and didn't understand that he was supposed to come in when I opened the door. So, he'd just continue hanging there meowing when I opened the door until finally letting himself down and running back out into the yard. Michiru also doesn't always come in. If she's decided that I've taken too long to get to the door, she drops to the ground and just stares at me with a look that says, "Since you took your sweet time coming to the door, I'm going to take my sweet time coming in." If I close the door on her, then she leaps over the backyard fence and onto the window that's directly above the Compaq laptop and meows frantically in the window.

So, those are my adventures in having feline office assistants. They probably think that they should all get yearly performance reviews with "Exceeds Expectations." Maybe they should. I figure that in some ways, they're still less destructive and annoying than human office workers who complain that I'm too loud when I talk on the phone or try to sabotage my work because they think I'm a threat of some kind....