Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Ready for Superbowl Sunday”

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January 28, 2008

Ready for Superbowl Sunday

Hatched by Dave Ross

I’m getting ready for Superbowl Sunday.

I’ve programmed my TIVO. I’ve collected my coupons. I’ve got my shopping list. I’m getting my tires rotated today so that I’ll be in good shape to hit the road.

What? I’m not watching TV on that day?

Quite the contrary. Superbowl Sunday is my day to visit the malls, go the the bookstore and maybe even take in a movie, knowing that I’ll have the theater to myself and probably won’t have to deal with curtain crawlers or teenagers wearing their ballcaps backwards. Or many adults for that matter.

The Superbowl. That’s football, right? I know it’s not baseball. Or soccer. Isn’t there someone from the east coast playing someone else from the east coast? Do I have that right?

So, you ask, why am I programming my TV to record this event about which I have no interest? Simple. For the commercials. The Superbowl traditionally has some of the best commercials you’ll see all year. And, until the advent of the TIVO, I had to miss them because I would have had to watch the game.

Somebody asked me if I have any empathy, or sympathy for those who have to work on Superbowl Sunday in order to keep the stores open so that I will be able to browse to my heart’s content because other people won’t be clogging up the aisles or the freeways.

In a word, no. Oh, well, yes I can identify with them. I remember the days when I used to work at a convenience store that will remain nameless, although its rhyming numbers might give you a clue. I used to be assigned to work all night beginning on Christmas Eve.

The owner of the store would come in to wish me a Merry Christmas and I would grumble a merry "Bah Humbug!"

To which he would give me some trite wisdom about how I should celebrate Christmas.

To which I thought: "Well, if you weren’t so greedy, I’d be celebrating Christmas right now!"

I have since then come to realize that it’s the height of good capitalism to make people work on holidays. Even Superbowl.

I told a friend of mine about what I do each year and he said my strategy might backfire on me.

"Once me and the wife and kids went to Disneyland on Superbowl Sunday. It was packed! Full of other ‘whipped husbands and their wives," he said.

Well, no plan is perfect. But I think that mine will work out just fine. His experience does remind me that another advantage to this approach is that most of the people out and about on Sunday will be women -- who are not sports fans!

So, on Sunday, on what, if history is any judge, will be another boring football game, think of me, having fun and totally ignoring you and the national pastime.

Or is that baseball?

Hatched by Dave Ross on this day, January 28, 2008, at the time of 12:29 PM