11.08.2007
Here’s to the watercooler celebration dance
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There’s so much to envy about professional sports players.
Undoubtedly, their disgusting salaries rank high on the wish lists of those of us scrounging for pennies when rent is due and living on dehydrated noodles in between paychecks.
Most of their money comes from the sponsorships they get from being super-sweet basketball players or football players or shoot-em-up-with-roids-and-knock-one-out-of-the-park players.
These men and women get to be poster-people for shoes and clothes and (ew) hot dogs (there’s a very awkward Carson Palmer advertisement floating around not-exactly-meat consumers — if you ever get a chance to endorse something, don’t do hot dogs).
And the celebrations. Oh, the celebrations.
Why is it that no matter which football game you’re watching, no matter what the score is, no matter what the play is, at least one player will rejoice as though he himself were the Second Coming?
There are some instances in which a player has every right to prance about the end zone cheering like a 6-year-old girl.
For example, on Sunday as the Lions were embarrassing that so-called team from Denver, a Detroit defensive tackle weighing at least a million pounds snagged an interception and returned it nearly 70 yards for a touchdown.
Who could have blamed the big guy if he had stripped down to a tutu and twirled across the field after completing what had to be the play of his career?
However, huge displays after 3-yard runs and thanking God for a routine tackle seems a bit overboard.
Can you imagine a barista at Starbucks making a run-of-the-mill grande nonfat no-sugar nondairy hazelnut latte and upon watching a satisfied customer walk out the door, he spikes a muffin and holds one finger toward the sky?
Maybe everybody’s job would be a bit more bearable if mundane moments could turn into exalted ecstasy.
Accountants could end a day of filing W-2s by dumping vats of Gatorade on each other.
Nurses could take temperatures and strike the Heisman pose while delivering a patient’s fate.
And you know how at the beginning of the football game, some cocky wide receiver or smarmy tackle introduces the the offensive or defensive players, often using some “clever” scripted pun or inside joke?
What if receptionists could do that?
“Yes, Ms. Meier? I have Jane ‘the woman who really annoys you and always has spinach in her teeth’ Jones on line two.”
“Sorry to interrupt your meeting, high-class professionals, but Mr. Jones, you have Fred ‘Smells like butt’ Smith waiting for you in the hall.”
And the next day — BAM — the receptionist is doing Post-It commercials.
Sports players get away with just doing about anything while at work. Maybe they get fined $5,000 for “unsportsmanlike conduct,” but that’s just a drop in the overflowing bucket to them.
Everyone should get to make tons of money for doing their jobs — only half the time doing them well — and throwing extravagant, self-gratifying parties afterward, only to be presented with the opportunity to babble on TV for 30 seconds promoting a product everyone knows they don’t use.
As long as it’s not hot dogs.