September 11, 2008
By Brian Watkins
Brian Watkins
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Before I begin this week’s column, I wanted to ask you to take a moment and remember those we lost seven years ago.
I was in the Army at the time of the attacks, stationed in California. I watched with the rest of the world as smoke poured from the Pentagon and the towers fell. I knew several people working at the Pentagon on that day and could only imagine what was going on there. Thankfully, they were all safe -- but 184 others were not so lucky. In New York, another 2,742 souls were lost
A few months later, I was assigned to the Pentagon and spent the next three years there. Each year the memorial ceremony grew a little smaller- but the somberness of the day did not.
Regardless of your political beliefs, take a moment, if you will, and remember those we lost, and remember the day.
Drivers and their crews and an entire NASCAR entourage crisscross the country week after week to put on the show that is NASCAR. While I’m not nearly that busy, I do have a full plate and spend my weekends paying catch up with the lawn and the kids and the odds and ends around the house that slip through the cracks all week. From time to time I’ll even skip the works and just sit around and do nothing. This past weekend was one of those lazy weekends. I didn’t get online, I didn’t watch TV… frankly I’m not sure what I did. But the whole time I was busy not doing anything, I did so with the confidence that my trusty DVR was standing by, ready to record this show and that -- and most importantly the race at Richmond.
I have become very dependant on that little invention. I don’t live by the TV schedule anymore. If there is a show on Thursday night that I would like to watch, I can watch it on Saturday if I want. If a rerun of Jerry Springer comes on in the middle of the day while I’m at work, I can have it recorded and get my dose of people that make me feel better about myself later that night. And best of all, I can watch the races at my pace. Commercial breaks are only a few seconds long as I skip through them and back to the action. If there’s some good racing on the track but my body is telling me it’s time to visit the bathroom down the hall, I can pause the race and resume it when business is done. There really isn’t much not to like about the DVR -- except for the fact that it doesn’t read the news.
It seems neither I nor my DVR got the word that the Richmond race was pushed to Sunday. Even when I sat down to replay it Sunday evening, I hadn’t heard it was moved. I was uncharacteristically unaware of what was happening with NASCAR last weekend and it bit me in the behind.
Sunday evening, I flopped down and found the 5+ hours of NASCAR racing sitting on my DVR. I started the recording and started skipping through the commercials, only to come across a football game.
“That’s nice” I though out loud, “ABC decided football was more important than pre-race”.
I skipped ahead again and as I did a NASCAR Sprint Cup graphic would pop up from time to time. I assumed it was the network letting antsy fans like me know that they will be cutting to the race as soon as it starts. I continued watching all of this in fast forward when I saw what looked like a movie starting. How odd -- maybe there was a rain delay -- I kept going and going through the recording. By now I knew something must have gone horribly wrong because there were no shots of a rain soaked track, no pit reporters under umbrellas, no cars draped in their covers and no diehard fans sitting in the bleachers in red and yellow souvenir stand ponchos. Just then a NASCAR graphic flashed on the screen -- I backed up the recording to see that the message wasn’t anything about a delay, but that in fact the race had been moved to 1 p.m. on Sunday.
After cursing (mildly of course) for a few moments, I went back and checked the menu on the DVR. Sure enough, there had been no race recorded on Sunday. There I was, Mr. Writes-for-a-racing-website, and not only had I missed the fact that the race had been rescheduled, I also missed the entire event. After yelling at the DVR for a few moments and kicking the cat (I didn’t really kick the cat, but I thought about it longer than my wife would have liked) the best I could do was jump back and forth between Insider Racing News and the NASCAR website to try and figure out what all I had missed.
By the time I’d pieced it all together, I realized two important things. First of all was that NASCAR needs to call me and let me know when there’s a schedule change. I’ll even accept a text message if that’s the best they can do for me.
The second thing I realized was that by missing the race, I had nothing to write about this week. No comments about driver behavior, no complaints about officiating or about anything for that matter. In fact, someone who knew nothing about NASCAR at all and happened to catch a few laps of the race while flipping from cooking show to cooking show was better prepared to write my column than I was.
Luckily for me, the whole DVR debacle was just interesting enough to share.
You can contact Brian Watkins at .. Insider Racing News
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The thoughts and ideas expressed by this writer or any other writer on Insider Racing News, are not necessarily the views of the staff and/or management of IRN.
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