It's Hard To Be Oblivious

In the line of humans I want to punch in the face, standing right behind the people who say "Don't even try to talk to me until after I've had my morning coffee", are the people who miss a sporting event/TV show, plan to watch it later on DVR and then think it is shared responsibility of everyone in the world not to reveal the ending to them. "Don't ruin it for me!", complete strangers will yell at you as you begin to discuss it with a friend/co-worker. (First off, stop eavesdropping on conversations no one invited you into in the first place and you won't have this issue.) Now, I know life has a habit of getting in the way of an evening of entertainment, so if the person is a friend I'm willing to hold back discussing the outcome of some TV show or sporting event for a couple days and I won't reveal the ending to a movie until it has come out on video. However, my policy is if you wait any longer to watch it then it wasn't all that important to you to begin with and all bets are off. And if you're a complete stranger, I don't owe you that courtesy and I'm annoyed that you acted like I was supposed to know you hadn't watched the game to begin with.

So, of course, in one of life's little jokes, I found myself in a similar boat as these people on Saturday. After a good first round and a mediocre second round in his first tournament back from an injury, Tiger Woods was scheduled play in what suddenly became a very intriguing third round. Already scheduled to start early in the day, all the tee times were pushed up due to inclement weather, meaning by the time the TV window kicked in, Woods would be 95% done for the day. His entire round would be shown on tape delay. Since I was more interested in watching it than just reading his scores, I made a vow to stay off of Twitter and the Golf Channel until the TV coverage kicked in and I could watch the pre-recorded round unfold as if it was happening live. I just had to make it three hours.

I made it about one.

I spent the morning avoiding TV and the Internet, trying to read and not to turn my TV on. The problem is the book I'm reading really sucks. When I bought it I thought it was about golf, but it's really about the writer trying to use golf as a way to 'find himself', asking himself if he's really happy with life, visualizing negativity as a pinwheel in his chest that he needs to reverse and a bunch of other new-age crap which annoys me to no end. As such I can only read it in 5-10 page spurts before I get so annoyed with the author I toss the book away while muttering something about damn hippies and how awful this book is. (And before you ask, yes, I will keep torturing myself like this because I have to keep reading until I finish it. I've come this far, I just need to get it over with.)

About the 4th or 5th time I tossed the book away I thought I could chance a glance on ESPN, maybe catch some highlights from the previous night's baseball game. The network has started running a graphic on the side of the screen to tell you what's coming up next and I assumed that would give me enough of a head's up I could change the channel before I saw an update on Tiger's round. Besides, I didn't think it would be that big of a news story. Turns out that was a miscalculation. About 20 seconds after I turned the TV on a "Score Update" graphic appeared at the bottom of the screen. For some reason I still assumed it would be about something else, even though nothing else was going on. Instead it read, "Woods bogeys #10, (+2) for the day. (+3) for Tournament." So much for that plan. At that point the cat was out of the bag and trying to remain in the dark was a wasted exercise. I resumed my normal habits and knew the full details of Tiger's round before they ever showed a shot on TV.

This kind of thing makes me wonder how much longer TV is going to keep showing tape-delayed events. With today's technology, it's really hard to unplug once you've plugged yourself in. You just get into habits. I mean, there are so many places for people to get updates or find alternate feeds they can stream through the Internet; expecting people to remain in the dark until the regularly scheduled broadcast is probably unrealistic. I know that showing something earlier than planned would throw a wrench into the rest of the day's programming, but when you see the ratings for tape-delayed sporting events you have to ask if it would be worth it. Besides, if they moved their scheduled programming back a couple hours, maybe it would give more people a chance to watch it live and not on their DVRs (and after they've had their morning coffee). There's a scenario where we all win.