The Regional Middle Management League Has Completely Lost Its Way
As a lifelong fan of professional synergising, I cannot sit by and watch these rookies ruin the sport with actual productivity.
I have watched professional middle management since athletes warmed up by staring blankly at a spreadsheet for three hours. The sport meant something then. Last weekend, after the Lower Wombley Paperclip Panthers played the Upper Snoring Synergy Squad, I decided my season ticket had become an expensive administrative error. There was scarcely any pointless bureaucracy on the field. Sickening.
The new rookie draft picks are where it starts. Their star, rookie sensation Kevin Flobkins, plays Assistant Vice Director of Operations, a position with real demands. In the third quarter, he skipped the mandatory two-hour meeting about the colour of the new staplers and simply bought them. He made a decision during play. The referee missed it. The crowd was too stunned to boo.
That sort of thing would not have stood in my day. A proper champion could keep one email chain alive for an entire fiscal quarter, moving it gently from inbox to inbox until nobody remembered the original question. Some players spent a whole match making digital subfolders inside other subfolders, right up to the moment the team server gave up. That was athleticism. We paid good money for it on Saturday afternoons, in freezing rain, holding coffee from a vending machine that had already lost the will to heat water.
“Efficiency has absolutely no place in this arena.”
The league has now put time limits on corporate jargon. A player gets three uses of “circling back” per half before the penalty arrives. How is anyone meant to delay a project properly after that? The tactical side has gone. I watched a player try “taking this offline” instead, but he said it without the necessary cowardice.
And the half-time entertainment has followed it downhill. Mandatory team-building trust falls now leave players exhausted before the second half. The Panthers’ defensive blocker pulled a hamstring trying to catch a regional wellness coordinator. It is dangerous. Worse, it distracts from the central discipline of ignoring colleagues in the communal kitchen.
The coaches have helped create this mess. Milton Flange, head coach of the Synergy Squad, was caught last week encouraging his team to meet quarterly targets. That breaches the spirit of the game. A rules committee spokesperson said yesterday that efficiency has no place in this arena. Professional middle management exists so people can look extremely busy while producing nothing of substance.
If the commissioner does not require four hours of pointless training seminars every week, the sport will not survive the winter. Fans want elite athletes replying all to company-wide memos. They do not want logistical problems solved. Until the league returns to weaponised incompetence, I’ll spend my weekends with the Competitive Microwave Fish Reheating tournament instead.