Blogger 365 Day 184 - Halfway home

     Well, we have made it this far.  Yesterday was the halfway point into the foray of nothingness.  It is almost the Seinfeld of blogs in that regard, though not quite as funny. I am trying not to get to overly happy about reaching this point, if only because I was down this road the last time I attempted this type of project, only to come up short at the end of the day.  And with my schedule being what it is, I can see where I might end up coming up short some day and missing an entry, though I will try my darnedest not to.

     I know there are some things that I would like to get to yet, I am long overdue for a change meter update and I may have plans for the 4th of July (fingers are crossed on that one), so hopefully there will be things to write about in the coming days.  I still haven't figured out the family reunion thing yet, maybe I will square my plans away tomorrow.  Being a holiday I am not going to have quite as much paperwork to do, so I may be able to work on other things, like my schedule. 

     Anyway, I am getting hungry, but I am also lazy, which is a bad combination.  I should just make something rather than be up half the night thinking about making something and the sooner I stop doing this, the sooner I can get to doing that.

Blogger 365 Day 183 - Attention spans

   So I am finding one of my new work requirements, though technically I wasn't tasked with it, is now keeping track of employee hours and schedule requests.  This used to be a thing Ed did, but far too often he would rely on simple pieces of paper and his memory to get by.  That usually resulted in him forgetting things and then us scrambling to fix the schedule/payroll after the fact.  With the holiday on Friday, Ed was looking to get a jump on next weeks schedule, I had to remind him that next Friday he had three people requesting off, and that over the last two days two people have either left early and/or showed up late.  Ed relies on the honor system, that people will be honest when it comes to marking the schedule; I am not so foolish, I know that there is a subset of people that if they can get paid for not even being on the premises, they will go ahead and try to make that happen.   That might have worked a month ago, it doesn't work anymore.  Meet the new boss, not the same as the old boss.

     I am still managing to do Brian's job as well as my own in his absence,  so far no major screw ups, but I am finding there just isn't enough hours in the work day to manage it all and still get done what I want to do.  I haven't even approached Ed about the family reunion yet, I will wait till Thursday or Friday for that, though with three people requesting off next Friday and three next Saturday as well, me taking Saturday off is looking less likely to happen. 

      So this is what a promotion looks like?  I am almost ready to be demoted at this point.

Blogger 365 Day 182 - Now we test the hypothesis

     So for the last few weeks we have been told that soccer is taking hold in America, TV ratings were at record highs and interest in the sport has never been greater.  This is the kind of self serving narrative the media is so good at, they come up with a subject (in this case the popularity of soccer) and then spend weeks of time talking about how everyone is talking about it, even though  many of the people talking about it reside in the media vacuum and spent the time talking about how other media members were chirping about it.  The true test of whether or not there has been a cultural shift is what happens afterward, and based on past history, usually the answer is not much.

     The MLS, America's professional soccer league, has not seen a growth in attendance, in fact this year there has been a slight decline (-.6%) from last year.  An average MLS building seats 21,096 people and games are playing to 88% capacity, meaning that if you ever want to see professional soccer in the United States you can probably go up to the ticket window on game day, good seats will still be available.

    Mind you this is the same narrative we heard about the women's soccer team (where the United States fares far better than the men's does) and the story was how girls were taking a brand new interest in soccer.  Except they weren't, save for a couple of players from those women's teams the vast majority of those rosters fell into relative obscurity. 

     The World Cup is a unique event, not unlike the Olympics, in that it comes around every 4 years and taps into a certain amount of patriotic fervor of the competing teams.  But after the Olympics no one argues that there is a new found interest in say, track and field or figure skating.  We recognize the Olympics for what they are, a break from the normal, not a long term trend.  Much was made about the fact that the United States - Germany was the highest rated soccer match in history, with 25 million viewers, but how is that different from the last Winter Games in Sochi, where despite all of the media horror stories about the conditions in Sochi (and the media loves to talk about how hard things are for the media), the first three days of those games had the following audiences, 26+ million, 25+ million and 20+ million.  Not all that different than soccer.

    So before I am going to buy into this idea that there is some new found interest in soccer here in the states, I am going to need to see more that a global media spectacle to be convinced.