kris

Kris invited me to play in a ProTrade challenge, ProTrade being a fantasy football meets the stock exchange type of website, where people can buy stock in players and receive dividends. A challenge is a group of people who compete amongst themselves. The main difference between regular fantasy football (or any other fantasy sport) and ProTrade is that only one player can own a player in the fantasy sports, where as multiple players can own a part of a player in the ProTrade model.

So, despite my reluctance to participate in any fantasy sports (Me. Sports. Not so much.), I signed up for the challenge. I, of course, used the "pick my players for me" feature, allowing the site to draft me five players to play.

And I rocked!

I was consistently at second place in the challenge last week. Kris squeaked by me on Monday night, his having players who played on Monday night and my not. No problem.

Well, along comes Friday night (last night), and Kris tells me I should trade my players out for players who are playing on Saturday. These players can earn me dividends, so I'd be throwing (admittedly ProTrade fake) money away not trading in and getting some playing players.

Eying him suspiciously, I listen to him, trading away Peyton Manning and Joe Jurevicius for some lame-o players that not only didn't early any dividends, but actually lost money.

Did I mention that Kris was the one who made these new picks for me?

Yeah.

So, I drifted down from third, to fourth, to fifth, to dead last as the buy-sell fees ate away completely ALL of my fake-dividends.

Weak sauce, indeed. Weak sauce for freakin' listening to Kris. Suuuuuuurrrrrre, you're just trying to help me. Suuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrre, there wasn't the slightest ulterior motive on that "you should trade players" comment.

Another argument for buy-and-hold demonstrated, though the fake market of ProTrade. Those fees'll kill ya.

BTW, you can't post "crap" in the ProTrade forums. It's considered "profanity." Go fig.

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Kris often tells a story of his high school baseball coach. Actually, he tells a lot of stories about the guy. Enough that there might have been more than one coach, and I just blur them all together.

The most entertaining of the stories is the one that ends with his coach commenting to Kris, "McQueen, I time you running to first base with a calendar."

But, the one relevant to me at the moment is the one where he talks about the coach's yelling. When the coach became frustrated (usually because the team wasn't winning, as in not-winning so well, they were on a losing streak that stretched across half the county), the coach would start yelling. As Kris puts it, he was mad from the beginning.

Eventually, where that "eventually" amounted to the second day of practice, all the players would ignore the coach. Let him scream, no one's listening.

I recently experienced much the situation. A message I received contained LOTS and LOTS of CAPITAL LETTERS, indicating annoyance, perhaps anger, directed at me.

My first reaction was complete stress. My heart rate shot up, my limbs flooded with adrenalin, my blood pressure jumped. My second reaction was one of, well, resignation. The issues being YELLED SO LOUDLY weren't any I COULD FIX, nor were they that much of A BIG DEAL.

The whole thing kinda annoyed me. The best thing was that it helped me make a decision to end my relationship with the sender of the message. I'd been unable to decide for a while now if the relationship was worth saving. With the YELLING message, I've decided it's not, and have begun the split.

I should have learned how to tune out the noise sooner.

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