Jobs

I work at a small/medium sized advertising agency in New York, where every day is like slowly experiencing death. We devise campaigns, put together powerpoint presentations, slave over the details, worry about the execution. In the end, I'm not sure how much of an impact is made. One of my old bosses used to say "Relax, it's not curing cancer", but somehow, every single moment feels like living and dying. Deadlines need to be met, goals have to be reached, explanations need to be given for success or failure. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Whenever things get tough at work, I think about people who are under more pressure than I do. Soldiers, or a doctors, or even nurses like my mom. Those jobs are the most pressure packed and exhausting I can imagine. I can't imagine how I would react if I was caught in a battle zone, pinned down by sniper fire. My only frame of reference for being dropped into war is Call of Duty 4. If war was anything like the game, I would hear two shots as soon as a enter the field, and everything would turn gray before fading to black. In a the game, I would be taken back to the last checkpoint, but obviously, that doesn't happen in real life. There are no continues or checkpoints or extra lives. I would tie the analogy together, but I'm not qualified. I should have chosen to write about beer instead of war.

For a doctor or a nurse at a hospital, there's just as much pressure. You always have to do a good job. You can't mess up, or else someone could die. There's no sugarcoating a patient dying under your watch. You can't say "Yeah, we accidentally replaced your wife's liver with a shoe. Sorry." Unfortunately, "Death" is part of the job description. Doctors and nurses can't save everyone, even the best ones who try their hardest day in and day out. If I woke up every morning knowing I had to save someone from entering cardiac arrest, I would be the one having a heart attack. I don't know how I would handle it. I certainly wouldn't be able to write something like this. My keyboard and mouse would short circuit from all the tears.

As my job has taught me, not everything has to be life and death to be difficult and trying. Last night, 24 men and their leaders were involved in one of the most grueling work situations of all time. Last night, these men performed at the highest levels for an extended period of time. Last night, these men were brought to the limits few can imagine.

The Universities of Syracuse and Connecticut played a six overtime college basketball game.

Two halves. Six overtimes. 70 minutes of basketball.

Last night's Big East Tournament semi-finals game lasted 3 hours and 46 minutes. Lord of the Rings: Return of the King was 3 hours and 31 minutes. Titanic was 3 hours and 14 minutes. Syracuse vs. UConn was longer than all of them. The game was as long as Gone With The Wind, which also clocked in at astounding 226 minutes and featured the southern team losing at the end.

3 hours and 46 minutes.

College basketball isn't comparable to being on the front lines of war, or performing open heart surgery, but running up and down the court, playing hard, tough basketball for 70 minutes is brutal. It even had to be tough for anyone sitting on the bench, or the fans watching in the stands. The last minute of a close game is agonizing. Every single second of any overtime period is like having a heart attack. And in Syracuse-UConn, there were six of them.

Oh, and none of the kids playing got paid for it. 'Cuse point guard Jonny Flynn played 67 minutes, and all he got was a pat on the back and a cup of Gatorade.

I only saw part of the game, and even then I wasn't really paying attention. I had it on in the background while I played MLB '09: The Show. At 11:00 I flipped over to Comedy Central to see Jon Stewart smack down Jim Cramer. Then I read a book and went to bed.

Why didn't I stay up? Because I had work the next day.


“I’ve got no words,”
--Jim Boeheim, Syracuse Coach, corpse.