Office Pools
One of the things I miss about not working in office is the absence of the office pools. There were the standard sports-related pools, that I generally ignored, because I never had an interest in American sports.
The pools I liked were like the big pool in Alaska on the thaw of the Tanana River [just occurred on Friday with a quarter million dollar pay out], or when something we expected would happen.
If we worked in an office, instead of being individuals, by now someone would have started a pool on when Arlen Specter will vote with the Democrats in the Senate for the first time. There obviously wasn’t a performance clause in his contract when he supposedly switched teams.
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…that one would probably cause lots of heated debates in my office over the exact meaning of the terms of the pool question (bureaucrats being the way they are). One side would want to stick with the exact question (which would provide an opportunity to look at the Senate calendar and make a guess on a vote where his interests coincide with those of the majority of Democratic Senators). The other would probably want to insist on framing it as “when will he vote as a self-identified Democrat” (which may well mean that the winning date would be “never”)…
Jack K., the Grumpy Forester´s last blog post..I’m Here To Help
I can assure you that at the “cop shop” the wording on pools often included discussions with the county attorney and a couple of guys from the DA’s office.
In the Alaska Tanana pool there is an official device attached to a clock that is the ruling authority on the time as there was a major brawl one year over whether the buoy had moved more or less the required distance when it had apparently moved the exact distance in the wording [some argued that the pool could only be paid if the buoy had moved the exact distance].
The guy should have just retired and found a local bar to bore.
Office pools in a large law firm would take years to declare a winner and probably have to be litigated in various courts, by which time the winner has retired or died, and the win would be declared null and void and would have to be started again. 😆 After all… they have to keep in character, and paying out any money for any reason is total anathema to a lawyer, as opposed to doing everything possible to take money. 🙂
Republican pools must be a joy also. They’d spend their term working as hard as possible not to declare a winner, and then because of re-elections etc, would have to redraft the pool conditions and so on, etc. The winner would be whoever can get a filibuster in. LOL
In a cop shop the conditions are usually two pages long, and it normally requires a staff meeting to decide the winner. That’s why they normally stick to sports.