michaelwarf.com | The personal space of Michael Warf, Best Practice Evangelist

Hockey? I’ll Pass Thanks.

Published on 21/04/08
by mwarf

I work in an office infatuated with professional hockey.

I know what your thinking, “Hockey?”, not our national sport of Lacrosse?

No. Hockey. Specifically, Playoff Hockey.

To give you some insight to how intense the culture is:

  1. We have a table hockey game permanently on display
  2. My coworkers have a collective blog devoted to the Calgary Flames
  3. Casual Friday, means sporting a vintage or “away” jersey
  4. 36.7% (I counted) of the verbal office chatter contains the keywords “puck”, “powerplay”,”penalty”,”kickass”, etc.
  5. Productivity is negatively impacted if the team performed poorly the night before

Now, this wouldn’t be so bad if I was a rabid hockey fan - but I’m completely indifferent. I went swimming with my kids yesterday and quite enjoyed participating in sport, it was invigorating and competitive - but like 20% of the male population, I could care less about watching other people’s kids have all the fun from the stands - and that’s what professional sport is to me. Voyeurism at its best. A gladiator ring for the modern era.

I’m compelled to explain to the jocks and bandwagoneers just what observing your maniacal passion for hockey feels like, so as I was walking to work this morning I came up with this metaphor which hits pretty close.

Imagine if your hockey talk was replaced with talk about shirts. Yes, the kind of shirts with two armholes, fancy collar styles and various sleevelengths.

Your conversation might sound like this:

“Wow, did you see that shirt last night”

“Yeah, wasn’t that great? Tailoring for the textbooks on that one!”

“That shirt deserved MVP for that thread count and Indian Cotton content”

“Really? I thought the french cuffs were more of a bonus feature. Nice save with the portly fit in the midsection though eh? Did you see the collar-rib he used to stand that thing up? Unbelievable.”

“I heard he got that button-down oxford on trade at Value Village, I’m not sure an oxford was worth his donation of two banded collar classics though”

“Do you think the franchise will ever expand into pants? Alot of fine fabrics have defected from virgin wool territory…”

“Dude, did you see the sleeve length on that one? Obviously a 37, when he was rockin’ a 36 at least. And the neck size! His throat could easily have gone to a 17.5! Where are the stats from his previous fittings, pull his tailoring card!”.

As novel as this conversation sounds at first, I’m sure you can see where it eventually goes “threadbare”.

Dear Canadian teams,

Please either win your trophy soon, or die a formal death so I can regain my office sanity.

That's it. What Next?

Please leave your comment so we know what you think about this article. Trackback URL: Hockey? I’ll Pass Thanks..