In This Edition:
1.
Another Basketball Crown
2.
Information Overload in Ticket Sales
3.
Madness Over the Top!
4.
On the Lighter Side
Another Basketball Crown
Last year at this time I was celebrating the unprecedented double
win in college basketball. The Univesity of Connecticut, my alma mater, won
both the Men's and Women's NCAA championship on consecutive nights, a feat
that might not occur again for decades. Now, in my current home of Chapel
Hill, the men's team has gone on to win the 2005 NCAA championship. You
could say that I am one lucky fan.
Information Overload in Ticket Sales
In Chapel Hill, once a year just before the basketball season, the
University of North Carolina's daily paper The Daily Tar Heel publishes "The
Carolina Fan's Guide to Student Tickets." What kind of feature within the
newspaper would you suppose it would take to describe how to obtain tickets
to men's basketball for the coming season? One column, extending from 10-12
inches? A quarter of the page? Not close.
In all, it takes more than 15 minutes to read the page describing
the University of North Carolina's student ticket distribution procedure,
and there are 36 separate types of instructions.
This annual "guide" takes up a full newspaper page, in other words
12" by 23" inches and requires 1,750 words -- equal to nearly seven pages of
a paper novel. There's a description of the senior "Dook" distribution, i.e.
how students are to get tickets to the game against the arch rival Duke Blue
Devils situated 10 miles away in Durham.
There's text about the ceiling fans program, a group of 500 students
who sit in the same seats of the last row in the upper level for the entire
year. There's a description of the riser seats program, which is a seating
arrangement in the Smith Center that includes approximately 400 student
seats and standing-only risers behind the basket. Why they call them seats
when it's only standing, I'll never know.
There's information about the Atlantic Coast Conference tournament
and how tickets will be distributed for those select games. There's a
basketball ticket distribution schedule, with dates, names of teams, and
fine print underneath describing in great detail ticket distribution policy
for individual games. There's a description of how the 2,000 lower level
tickets available for students are randomly distributed.
Madness Over the Top!
If you were a student on this campus and you wanted to attend a
men's basketball game, grappling with this page could cause you to miss a
class! Moreover, if the ticket distribution to men's basketball is this
complex, what must it be like to register for classes? What must it be like
to comply with other aspects of being a student from securing a dorm room,
signing up for a meal plan, to dropping a course if needed, to preparing for
graduation?
Imagine the zeal you'd have to have as a fan and a student to wade
through this morass of instruction. Personally, I wouldn't do it, and I'm an
avid basketball fan. I would find a friend who enjoys that kind of stuff or
at the least can force himself to make his way through all the instructions.
I would then simply ask, "ok, what do I need to do?"
Ah, life in this town of 85,000 is but a microcosm of society and
the larger world. Complexity reigns. People say in 135 words what they can
say in 35 words. Over-information abounds. The print wheels are in motion.
We wrote it, so you have to read it. These are our rules, and it takes a
long time to explain them all!
On the Lighter Side
Question: What did the monk say to the hot dog vendor?
Answer: "Make me one with everything."
The monk gave him five dollars and after a while asked, "Where's my
change?" The hot dog vendor said, "Change must come from within."
