No Offense, Dwight, but this One's for You

“Drop-out Eddie McCoy leaves Burger King for Wendy’s.  #whopperfail,” Shepard Smith reported (via  twitter).  On Good Morning America, George Stephanopolous revealed that Wendy’s has been hoping for years that Eddie would choose to seek employment with the fast-food chain, and that the team at the New York Ave location in Washington DC offered to give Eddie a tour of the restaurant and 20% off of his next meal there, clinching the deal.  Eddie was on the payroll two days later.  

Frank E. Thorne, day manager at Burger King, posted a bitter open letter by the entrance of the G St location, eviscerating Eddie for leaving BK for a $.10 per hour raise and supposed “improved workplace,” indicating, “Eddie could have asked for a raise!  I’m not unreasonable.  I just don’t feel like that ungrateful dog gave us a fair chance to keep him here at the Home of the Whopper,” and “We haven’t failed an inspection in months!”

"Eddie, do I look happy with you and your decision?"

In retaliation, McCoy posted a photo of himself grinning while emptying a trash can at Wendy’s to Instagram, and added a provocative tweet, referencing a popular sports bar and grill, “Best job ive ever had! Love the team here at @Wendys! Plus im closer to @NelliesDC now, gonna catch the big games after work! #ilovemyjob”

Eddie’s fans expressed mixed feelings about the move, such as “I loved watching Eddie mop the floors while I ate at the BK.  I’m not sure I’ll go there anymore,” “Wait, who’s Eddie?” and “Who needs that loser?  I never liked him anyway!  I knew he was a moneygrubber, the way he’d pick up loose change on the floor.”

Of course, no one would ever pay that much attention to which fast food joint a high school dropout chose to work at, but every summer we’re subjected to a similar media travesty as big name NBA players and their backups decide whether to re-sign with their current teams or to pursue other employment options.  And I don’t have a problem with NBA (or any other league’s) free agency.  In fact, I love that every few years the players get to make their own decisions without owners and GMs trading and waiving them as if they were just contracts with large numbers written next to dollar signs.  But I really don’t need to hear about it for weeks and weeks as the season progressively ends.

"Yeah, I am pretty awesome.
Thanks for noticing!  Have you heard I'm
thinking about playing for the Rockets?"
[Note: This photo should never have
been taken, even though he is awesome.]

 I don’t care that Dwight Howard picked up the tab for everyone at the Breakfast Klub in Houston (although that was a very nice thing to do).  I don’t care that LeBron, D-Wade, and Chris Bosh are besties and wanted to play together for years before it happened.  On the other hand, I am fairly interested to know which team makes the huge mistake of giving Kwame Brown a job, because there’s no pageantry there.  I’m always glad to hear that, in a turn of events surprising no one, the Spurs signed Tim Duncan again, or that he was willing to cut his salary in half to give the team more cap room.  In fact, it was good to know that LeBron was going to Miami, but I didn’t need an hour-long special or to hear him say “I’m going to take my talents to South Beach.”

I don’t have beef with NBA free agency.  Or that the sports news media follows it carefully and keeps us posted on the goings on.  After all, they don’t give us information that we don’t ask for, as a society of sports fans.  I have major beef, though, with the sports fans who for some reason want to be drowned in meaningless information.

I’ll try to refrain from redundancy, if only because the redundancy of a 24-hour news cycle is part of the problem I’m addressing here.  My impulse is to dissolve into a stream-of consciousness rant about the information fetish that plagues our society.  I’ll do what I can to avoid that, but I can’t avoid addressing the issue, because the lion’s share of the free agency problem lies there.

You know how the older generations are often concerned by how much time we spend on social media, and how the (very reasonable) cynics among us wonder why anyone would post a photo of their lunch to Instagram?  Conversely, you know how much time our parents and grandparents spend watching the news and reading the newspaper?  Yeah, me too.  We have the same problem manifest two different ways.  TS Eliot summed it up well when he asked (79 years ago, mind you), “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?  Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”   We are addicted to information that is at best tangential to real life. 

The CNN (or Fox News) addict, feet up thanks to the fine recliner that he bought last month, would tell me that I don’t have any understanding of how the world works and that I should stay posted on current events.  The Twitter addict, taking a break to stretch his neck and noticing that I’ve been trying to talk to him for 3 minutes, would tell me that it’s important to him to know what his friends are doing and what funny things his favorite celebrities told TMZ.  And do I realize that his 213 followers will wonder what’s up if he stops posting regularly?

You win.  You’re right.  I don’t know the news or pop culture as well as you do, and I’d actually like to know more of both of those things.  I love being informed.  Knowledge is important to me.  But not so important that I’ll risk losing my job as a summer camp counselor because I’m on facebook at work or that I’ll pass on playing a game with my little sister so I can watch a few more videos or look at a few more of my friend’s pictures.

Yep.  Glad we don't live like this anymore.

It used to be that humans got up early, worked hard all day, and went to bed early.  No time to go visiting friends more than occasionally.  No time to learn any more about the news than town gossip.  In short, there wasn't time for much but staying alive.  I’m glad we live in a modern world with plenty of discretionary time.  And I’m certainly not the most efficient in my use of all mine.

You better believe I’ll sit and watch the Nats even if I could be working out or cleaning my room.  No question I’ll put off my homework to hit up the open gym for a couple of hours of ball.  And it’s more than likely that I’ll talk on the phone so late that I can barely stand up when I get up at 6 for work, if I’m talking to the right person.  In fact, I put an idiotic amount of time and effort into writing this blog.  I don’t want to put myself on a pedestal, because I waste plenty of time, and it almost has to be that way.  The world we live in is so stressful and fast paced that we need to take some time to do what we love instead of what is most effective.  It’s just a question of priorities.

 

It’s not my purpose to speculate about how we got to the point that gathering information became the pinnacle of human activity.  Instead, I want to propose that gathering information isn't actually what makes us happy, and if more people understood and lived that we’d see fewer articles about Dwight Howard’s controversial year in LA and subsequent move to Houston, no question.  What would we see more of, though?  I’m not sure.  We’re all different and we’d all set our priorities differently.  I know some things I’d do better, though.  I’d get better grades, hang out with my kid sisters, play the guitar well, and live my religion a little better.  The majority of us would dedicate at least some of that extra time to doing and being good.  That’s what we want.  We all want a better world, but we’ll have to put our phones and remotes down before we’ll see it.