Not for me personally. I didn’t have too bad a series. But the events surrounding the outing caused me some consternation. I was the only regular on the team to show up; the others needed subs and one of those was a noob. I was responsible for the captain’s duties, including changing the names and handicaps on the scoreboard and collecting the weekly fees. The newbie was the only sub to show up on time. I had to pull another one out of the bar once league play started and the third arrived just as I was planning on updating the scoreboard with her absence.
Adding to the turmoil was the rather impatient elderly woman on the other team. She was already in high dudgeon as half my team were still putting on their shoes at the start of Game 1 and she spent the rest of the evening directing people to “just go up and bowl” or we risked “being here all night.” It didn’t help that the ball return on the lanes we played would frequently fail to return balls. So, we weren’t at the lanes all night, but we were the last teams to finish.
Unsurprisingly, my nerves were frayed to the point where I was intolerant to the behaviors of the players around me. In short, people were annoying the hell out of me. One such player was on another team to the right of us. I will call him ‘Bob’ to protect his anonymity . . . What? Bob won’t read this? Okay, his real name is Steve (still not his real name) . . . and he works in the Corporate Credit/Accounting department, so he already lacks some social graces. Bob-Steve looks like an 80’s adult movie actor, complete with porn-stache, and has a reputation of skeezing on some of the younger female co-workers. We had a recent college grad on the Parts Accounting team and Bob-Steve would often visit our end of the building, which is on the complete opposite side from his cubicle location. I don’t remember ever seeing him on my side of the building in the first 18 or so months I worked there before the college grad was hired, and haven’t seen him since she quit this summer. You do the math.
Anyway, Bob-Steve is a fairly accomplished bowler with an average nearing 200 pins. He is also an obnoxious attention hound, frequently celebrating his strikes and 4,7,10 split pick-ups with a ‘yes!’ and fist pump, or playing the woe-is-me card when he makes a mistake. On those rare occasions when he needs to roll a second ball in a frame, he provides a lengthy disquisition about “missing the pocket on the high/low side” to explain why he didn’t get a strike. With anyone else, it probably wouldn’t bother me much. However, he had the audacity to try to get sympathy because his first open frame of the series (halfway through Game 2) was leaving a 6 pin standing. Fortunately, he wasn’t talking to me; otherwise, I would have punched him in the dick.
As luck would have it, the subs were comparable bowlers to those they were replacing. However, we were giving up close to 100 pins in handicap per game, which turned out to be a tough obstacle to overcome. It’s a shame, too, because the team we were playing was one of the teams tied for first and our team was in a solid third place at 40 – 23, just one point away. We are nine points ahead of the fourth place team, so even if we end up losing all 7 points (2 for each win and 1 for most total pins) we should still be in third. Since the third sub was a newbie, we will have to see what his handicap is to determine how many points we earned, if any.
Game 1
8/, 7/, S81, 9-, 9-, S81, 9/, S72, X, X9- = 145
Game 2
X, 8/, X, S7-, 8/, S63, S81, 9-, 8-, 72 = 124
Game 3
8/, 7/, 8/, 8/, 8-, X, 7-, 9/, 7-, XX8 = 155
Series Total: 424
Series Avg.: 141
Season Avg.: 138
Season Hdcp.: 55
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