Friday morning, I walked past a colleague's desk and--I swear--saw a basketball game on her computer screen. When I got closer, however, all I could see were a bunch of very official-looking bars and charts.
(Credit:
NCAA)
She was working hard. Real hard. Then she laughed, hit a key, and flipped back to the basketball game in a clear indication that I'm either a boss people can be honest with or a boss who doesn't exactly strike fear into the rank and file. Or both.
The "boss button" and silly office decorum strike again. For those of you who for some reason don't know what a boss button is, it's pretty simple: It helps you look at stuff on your PC at work that you're not supposed to be looking at. Hit a key, and the screen instantly flips to something that vaguely looks like something you should be looking at in the office.
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Boss buttons (or keys) have been around for years, of course. Some Macintosh games back in the 1980s included them (though for most of us using Macs in those days, it was more like a "parent button" because we were supposed to be doing our homework). CNET's Download.com has a list of boss buttons, and there are even entire sites dedicated to them.
Come every March, thanks to office pools on the NCAA college basketball tournament, boss buttons are as common on desktop computers as personal e-mails and photos of your friends: They're probably not supposed to be there, but we all have them. NCAA.com has even provided a helpful boss button on its Web site.
Here's a thought: Let's stop all the silly shenanigans and make boss buttons a thing of the past. Get it out in the open and let people keep track of the office pools without worrying about getting into trouble. The average American is spending more time in the office than ever. And the average tech worker spends even more time than that. There's a reason all those Silicon Valley companies offer free food, subsidized child care, laundry, auto-detailing, and swanky gyms: So you never have an excuse to go home.
So cut those hardworking people a break. We're not talking porn here, folks. Let's put a TV somewhere in the office and stop all the sneaking around.
I know what the killjoys are thinking right now: This is a slippery slope! What's next: Christmas shopping at the desk? Sharing funny YouTube videos with coworkers? Where does the madness stop?
The ultimate office killjoys at Challenger, Gray & Christmas have even put a dollar figure on the money lost to people checking out the NCAA tournament while at work: It could be as much as $1.7 billion in wasted work time over the 16 business days of the tournament. The Challenger estimate is based on "the number of people expected to participate in office pools, the amount of money they earn and the amount of work time wasted on March Madness related activities, whether it is trash talking at the watercooler or watching live videos of the games during business hours."
While I have no idea how much money Challenger wasted doing this research, it does have a few more tidbits: A 2006 Harris poll found that 13 percent of Americans aged 18 and older plan to participate in an office March Madness pool. The press release announcing the Challenger survey goes on for six pages. In fairness, it offers some workplace tips for dealing with the tournament. OK, some of them are pretty corny, but I appreciate the spirit:
• Pick 64 MVPs. This is high on the cornball meter. Bestow MVP honors on employees chosen ahead of time...for some reason. No, I really don't get it either.
• Team sweatshirt day. Relax the dress code for the first Friday of the tournament so everyone can wear the sweatshirt of their favorite team. At CNET, we'd call this "formal attire day," but I imagine that would be letting down the hair at a lot of offices.
• Offer anti-tourney prizes. Basically, start something for the people who don't care about basketball. Sure. Gotta be fair and all that.
• Offer flexible schedules. Umm, OK, I don't know about this one. The manager in me says, "Are you insane? It's just freaking basketball."
• Organize a company pool. Done. I mean, CNET in no way encourages gambling on collegiate or professional sports.
• Keep a bracket posted. Good idea. But I should reiterate, CNET in no way encourages gambling on a collegiate or professional sports.
• Keep television in break room tuned to coverage. Duh! It's what I'm saying. Let's take it out of the closet. Do away with the boss button, and accept the facts: For 16 days, nearly all of us are college basketball fans. We pretend to know the starting lineup of Western Kentucky, and feign shock when Stanford fails yet again to make the Final Four.
And please, stop with the boss button. I know exactly what you're doing.
For the next three weeks, office workers across the country will have visions of buzzer-beaters dancing in their heads.
It's NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament time, and that means brackets will be zipping through e-mail systems in organizations large and small. There are dozens of sites that let you make your tournament choices online, whether to test your basketball-prediction acumen against the masses, or to recruit friends and coworkers in a private pool.
You can even use Google's Basketball Bracket Battle gadget to place your choices on your iGoogle page. After you select the "Create a bracket on iGoogle" link, the gadget is added to your iGoogle page, and you're invited to join a league, or to form a league of your own. Clicking the first option leads to a window where you give your bracket a name, or enter an existing league, which requires a password. The gadget lets you complete as many as five separate brackets, which you can share with friends and coworkers. The brackets weren't available as of 9 p.m. PDT last night, so I can't tell you anything about the selecting your winners, but you're also asked to predict the score of the championship game. You have to complete your picks by the start of the first game this Thursday.
DIY approach to basketball brackets
I got the fever early and spent part of my weekend creating my own brackets on Google Docs. First, I added rows for the first and second rounds, Regionals, Semifinals, and Championship. Since I followed the standard custom of putting two regional brackets side by side, I made mirror images, with the Midwest and West regions on one side, and the East and South regions on the other. Then I created the "brackets" themselves by adding lines to the bottom and sides of the appropriate cells by clicking the Borders icon on the toolbar and selecting one of the eight options.
Create your 'brackets' by choosing the appropriate border option from the Google Docs toolbar.
(Credit: Google)After I entered the seeds in each of the four brackets, the worksheet was ready to share with everyone, or a select few. I made it available to everyone by clicking the Publish button in the top-right corner of the window, which generates a URL you can send to anyone. I can also limit who has access to the brackets by clicking Share and choosing "to fill out a form" under Invite people on the left, and then the Start editing your form button.
Share your NCAA Basketball Tournament brackets with friends and coworkers by converting it into a form.
(Credit: Google)The only problem with the form approach is that you have to create a separate question for each game, and since you don't know who'll be playing after the first round, you have to use text fields rather than checkboxes or a two-item list; the other choices--paragraph text and multiple choice--aren't suitable in this instance. Still, the form approach simplifies management by making it easy to collect everyone's choices. It's also an effective alternative to the Microsoft Word approach to conducting surveys that I described last week. (My thanks to the readers who pointed out the online-survey technique).
After you complete the form questions, or if you share the worksheet as is, you add the e-mail addresses of your "collaborators", and decide whether they can invite others. You're also given the options to make the file read-only, or include its URL.
Now that you've set up your pool and made your picks, you can get back to work--at least until tipoff on Thursday.
Tomorrow: reduce your PC's power consumption.
Down the lane, into the future
(Credit: NBA)Expensive sports rights are a major cost for the United States television industry. Sports also brings huge ad revenue and a male audience that is much prized by advertisers because it's so elusive.
Now the NBA has signed new TV deals that run nearly a decade. This time the buyers get significant rights to Internet distribution of games, highlights and related content. Clearly, this is just another step toward the Internet becoming a full-fledged alternative to typical TV distribution. An ESPN executive said its Web site had a million unique visitors daily during the NBA playoffs earlier this year.
Is this a big deal? Well, it's more than $7 billion dollars worth. That's what Disney and Time Warner are paying for an additional eight years of NBA games. There is no direct allocation of costs between TV and online. Games will be both live and on demand via the various Web sites involved.
Two things are significant. Exclusive sports content like the NBA will help the Internet grow beyond its paltry 5.5% of all American ad dollars. Secondly: it shows the NBA embracing the new technologies, not resisting. Major League Baseball is going after the Slingbox, for example. Another sport that's keeping up with the times: the NHL has cut a deal with the Slingers.
One last pertinent point, the NBA itself will be streaming some games exclusively from its Web site and keeping that ad revenue. So a question regarding the future of sports online: who gets the money advertisers will gladly spend? Well, that's still a jump ball.
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