Diane's second point, about paucity of posts from league members, has been confounding the Commish all year. Where is Kevin, Wayne, Patrick, Kirk, and Brandy? Why the silence? The league was created to enable communication amongst the O'Leary brood, later to include the Gonyea's as well. Now it seems everyone feels the level of involvement and communication begins and ends with making his picks.
There are extenuating circumstances of course. Kevin has been in the midst of retiring and buying a new home in Deland, while still commuting to Naples daily. Wayne is in a death struggle trying to successfully sign on to Google, an entity he feels personally hates him and wants nothing less than total domination over all of mankind. Patrick has been dealing with his promotion at work to supervisor, necessitating a few tweaks to his persona. Kirk must be knee deep in the public works of Danby, which one can only assume is perilous, time consuming and ethically challenging. And Brandy's promotion as the supervisor for all online adjunct professors at Walden University has brought with it many more responsibilities, not to mention the heavy counseling she must be receiving to adjust to Kev and Jo being so close to her and her impressionable young ones. My own sons are no paragons. Luke has never been tempted to write or even view a post, and Marc writes the funniest, most trash talking posts, but never posts them. His sarcasm is something to behold.
And then there is Ed. Steady Eddie is truly a piece of work. He told me he views everything from the GoZone as spam, and has instructed his mail app to trash them immediately. Yet, he says that he is kept informed by Patrick, who must use his own sensibilities to filter the messages. To test this point, I asked Ed about a few posts I had recently posted, and he vaguely recalled hearing about them but could remember nothing about either. I tried a third. Same response, I then made up a phony post and he allowed he had heard about that one as well, but could remember nothing of the details. It is the height of irony that Ed has a commanding lead right now, never having even once actually communicated to the GoZone. The Senior Advisory Committee has suggested we meet to make sure everyone has at least the most basic level of commitment to the league. A proposal has been submitted requiring all members to use their own accounts to make their picks. This would mean that Ed could no longer allow Patrick to report his picks.
The Commish has been dealing with this communications problem all year long. He has been penning more and more toxic posts to get any response from anyone. While a few have participated, the usual suspects have declined. Finally it took a picture of Hitler to rouse the ire of Patrick, but then he claimed to like the much hated, thoroughly despicable and perverted Joffrey from Game of Thrones. That should be a disqualifier right there.
Let's hope that Diane can serve as our conscience and lead us to a league of which we can be proud.
