It’s hard for me to sit here and tell you that I am moved by large world problems. I certainly care about them, but they’re bigger than me, and it’s hard to see how these impact my daily life.
That is the opposite, however, for small world problems. I have an irrational reaction to small things that should be better, but aren’t. The fact that one of these vacuum robots can’t also empty my dishwasher absolutely befuddles me.
I can ask my Google AI to set an egg timer for 10 minutes, but the second I ask what the weather will be in two weeks in California, the thing starts to generate smoke and lock up. It’s maddening.
But there is no bigger trigger right now than on Saturdays when my butt is firmly implanted in my couch and the empty beer cans begin to start collecting on the coffee table.
The first time I heard it, I thought the announcer was just being cute. He was not being cute.
This year, college football installed a forced timeout at the 2:00 mark of the first half and the second half. This has been a rule in football since 1942, but did not exist in college football until last week.
You’ve come to know that as the “two-minute warning.” Except that’s not what announcers for college football have been asked to call it. They call it, instead, the “two-minute timeout.”
For some reason that I’m sure a therapist could better understand, this infuriates me. Reese Davis, announcer for ESPN who was on the LSU/USC game Saturday night seemed almost apologetic. “We’ve been asked to not call it a warning,” he said.
Why? Why is THIS the line that cannot be crossed? If I’m going to make a copy of a piece of paper, I’m going to Xerox it. If I’m going to sneeze, I grab a Kleenex. I’ll be absolutely damned if someone came up to me and said, “uh, sir, we’d really appreciate it if you called it a ‘nasal tissue’ from now on.”
Of course, many of us ran to social media to complain about this re-branding of a term. And the irony is that we went to Twitter which will never in my life be called “X.” This is simply a misuse of resources that can be used to solve some of those large world problems we were talking about earlier.
It will always be the Sears tower – not the Willis tower. It will always be Facebook and not Meta. It will always be the Sci-Fi channel and not SyFi. It will always be HBO and not Max. And it will, always and forever, be called the two-minute warning. Period. End of statement. Don’t make me throw my shoe at the TV anymore.
(Here’s your two minute warning to follow Chris Kamler on Twitter, where you’ll find him as @chriskamler)
