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| FEATURES |
The Office-Secretarial Theory Of Bracketology
By Dean Christopher
Date: 03-03-2006 |
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| As Carl Spackler would surely agree, in order to conquer an office secretary, you have to think like an office secretary. |
As we should all come to accept, even the blondest of secretaries can win an office pool. This is what they mean by “March Madness." And now that it’s Bracket Time, those of you who faithfully watch regular-season college basketball must come to the crippling realization that you know nothing about college basketball. Office pool success, after all, is a hideous concoction of dumb luck, odd odds and questionable chance that's randomly served, never ordered. Or is it?
In a desperate effort to penetrate the mind of the mysteriously successful office secretary, I’ve decided to use the most arbitrary, yet distantly logical method of picking this year’s winners. To paraphrase Caddyshack's Carl Spackler, “I have to laugh. Because I’ve often asked myself – my foe, my enemy is an office secretary. And in order to conquer the office secretary, I have to think like an office secretary, and whenever possible, to look like one.”
Except for the whole part about looking like an office secretary, that’s my hunch. And these are the office secretary's secrets...
1) Beginner's luck: The office secretary knows nothing concrete about any of the teams in the tournament, never mind the game of basketball. So right off the bat, you can throw record, prestige or any other legitimate measure of a program's potential right out the window.
2) Spreading the seed: The office secretary couldn't care less about calling the big upset and is more than happy to ride the higher seeds all the way to the Final Four.
3) The name game: The office secretary isn't bashful about making picks with mascots in mind. This is how “logic” plays into the ideology, as survival of the fittest reigns supreme. Lions, Tigers, Wildcats, and Wolf Packs – these are among the perennial favorites of the office secretary, who’s convinced that the NCAA tournament is some kind of prehistoric metaphoric jungle. Terrapins, Badgers and weak-sounding human names like Quakers, Colonials and Volunteers, on the other hand, will inevitably perish by this blindly Darwinist rationale.
So there you have it – the three-pronged "Office Secretarial Theory of Bracketology,” the method to the Madness, the coolest stool in the pool.
Happy picking.
E-mail Dean Christopher Chiungos at dean.christopher@deans-list.net. |
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