Crying Over Your Bracket? Better Than Your Bracelet

Quicken Loans sends Warren Buffet to Dover, NH to give me a check with 11 zeros on it. ESPN sets up a satellite feed from my home for daily pressers as bracket perfection lives for another day. Hundreds of fellow Townsquare Media employees obsess about my basketball prescience with a mixture of envy and awe.

Those dreams were all dead in less than 24 hours.

The annual dashed hopes that accompany a busted bracket seem very similar to another yearly disappointment from my grade school years. The Magazine Subscription Drive!

Back in the 70's and 80's, school kids would sell magazine subscriptions and the propaganda machine they used on our vulnerable minds bordered on psychological warfare. An incentive program laden with promises of personal pizza parties, mountains of over-sized candy bars, toys, games and stacks of cash.

Invariably, some kid with a parent employed at the largest factory would win the pizza party and the rest of us would sob quietly with nothing but a cadmium/lead alloy 'Made in Taiwan' bracelet as the only reward for our labors. Yes, even the boys.

So, for the rest of this tournament, I'll do what I always do, root for the employee who is being the least obnoxious and hope he or she buys me a slice a pizza with their winnings.

And dream of next year, and when I hit it big, I'll finally get the infected bracelet rash the medical attention it's needed since 1981.