Thursday, 5/3

If you're one of the two people I yelled at at the top of my lungs yesterday, I'm sorry. It wasn't personal.

Let me explain. I did not, in fact, yell at anyone to their face. I did not get mad, I did not fly off the handle, and I did not hurt anyone's feelings. Yet I still feel a little bad at what I did.

My “Pop Culture” question yesterday had to do with what the letters “NBC” stand for. I thought it was a fairly straight-forward question; after all, NBC was the country's first broadcast network, on the air for 92 years now, so I figured everyone would know what those three letters stand for.

I was wrong. Just not in the way I figured.

The first answers I received mirrored each other. Each of the callers had the first two letters correctly identified. They knew that the “N” stands for “National”, and that the “B” stands for “Broadcasting”. It's what happened after that that blew my mind. Some callers said “Corporation” or “Channel”, but two people said that the “C”in NBC stands for either “System” or “Service”. And that's a good guess, expect for the fact that if either of those were the correct answer, the company's initials would be “NBS”, and not “NBC”.

And that's when I had my little meltdown.

Well, it wasn't really a meltdown. It was mostly me yelling at the top of my lungs “Doesn't anyone know how to spell any more?” loud enough to travel through a supposedly soundproof wall. I know it was loud enough because another contest winner, standing on the other side of the supposedly soundproof wall waiting to pick up a prize, looked at me like I was losing my mind.

Oops. My bad.

Thankfully someone did get the answer right (the “C” stands for “Company”, if you're curious), restoring my faith in humanity. And maybe I can kind of understand the confusion; after all, the “S” in CBS stands for “System”, not that anyone would know that. So maybe those callers just mixed their metaphors, in a way. Maybe it was an innocent mistake on the part of the callers.

Maybe.

So if you were one of those callers, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to yell at you, even of I was just yelling to myself.

It's just one of those things...

8-)

(jim@wmqt.com)