this blog is actually a comment I made on RedwingQueen19’s excellent blog entitled Hockey Not a Real Sport? It’s about a Radio Shack employee making an offhand diss to her that Hockey wasn’t a real sport. It’s an excellent piece and I highly recommend clicking on it.

Sonny Styles made an astute comment on the blog, that working at Radio Shack may be punishment enough for dissing hockey.

But I see it going a step further. I see his boss, a huge Flyers fan, overhearing his flippant retort to RedwingsQueen19. Soon Radioshack boy is in the office being told ‘the company is going a different way.’Behind the manager, RadioShack Boy sees a well used copy of NHL 08. He’s handed his check and his time card disappears from it’s slot. He tries to look on the bright side and figures he’ll get a better job. But he knows the reason was his dissing hockey. He walks to the parking lot only to find his car was just jacked by two kids bored to death of playing Madden NFL 08 and looking for some fun. Stunned and despondent he heads to the nearest bar for a pity party. Parked on the stool He calls for a beer and the barmaid, wearing her lucky Blue Jackets Tee brings it over. She’s hot so he tries to start a conversation and maybe turn his day around. ‘Bluejackets. Who are they?’ he asks. She eagerly launches into a detailed discusson of how Rick Nash and RJ umberger and the gang are going to rock the Central this year. Angry at hearing about hockey, the thing he now hates, he blurts out ‘that’s not even a real sport.’ She gets red in the face and stalks off angrily. Her weightlifter boyfriend at the end of the bar, seeing some guy making his girlfriend upset, launches into Roid Rage and grabs RadioShack boy by the neck. His Devils Stanley Cup Champs 2000 tattoo bulging on an enormous bicep, the weightlifter hurls Radioshack boy head first through the nearest window. He lands unhurt but terrified in a hail of glass and starts screaming. Two beat cops hear the commotion and run to the scene. Seeing a man laying in a field of broken glass they start asking question. R.B. tells them ‘all I did was say hockey isn’t a real sport.’ The two patrolmen, who had just stopped debating whether Avery will work out in Dallas, promptly arrest him for disturbing the peace. After booking, a night in a cell with a wild eyed kings fan who kept moaning over and over ‘Crawford’s gone. It’s going to be all right now. Crawford’s gone’, and arraignment, he is sentenced to 90 days in county by a judge wearing his Wild jersey under his robe. While inside, he’s known as ‘the fish that don’t like hockey.’ His incarceration is long and arduous. Two months are tacked on for a ‘Hockey Night in Canada’ incident that led to a riot and subsequent lockdown. He learns not to criticize Don Cherry’s wardrobe. The hard way.

Flash forward six months. After his release, RadioShack boy can’t find a steady job. Finally his probation officer, a die hard Leafs fan, finds him work as a smell tester at the local sewage treatment plant. The hideous odor of his job description follows him wherever he goes. His new nickname is Stench. He is shunned by co workers and strangers alike. Friendless, his evenings are always the same, spent hanging out at the Avalanche O Suds car wash trying to water blast away the awful cloud of effluent that surrounds him. unsuccessful as always, he buys his usual quart of Glen Predator whiskey and staggers towards home. Almost immediately it starts to rain. A cold, hard rain. Well into his trip he finishes the bottle and hurls it onto the street. An oncoming car, filled with a happy, lively group headed to a house party to watch a Wings game, swerves to avoid the bottle and veers towards him. Terrifed, Radioshack boy backs away from the headlights aimed at him and falls into a culvert. The car manages to regain control and, not having seen the shadowy figure at the edge of the headlights glare, continue on, with one passenger commenting ‘man, what’s that smell?’ As the car’s engine noise fades, Radioshack boy lays in the bottom of the culvert, unhurt, but broken in spirit and will. A stray dog trying to find some shelter from the rain passes by, sniffs him, and urinates on his shoe. Past caring, he just lies in the small current of water coursing through the culvert. A piece of flotsam gently bumps his head. turning slowly, he can barely make out a waterlogged box. In the faint glow of the streetlights his drunken eyes focus on the words printed on it.

NHL O8

The moral of the story?

Karma is a Wings Fan.