Alright, so I was looking for the Ole Miss basketball score the other day. Just a regular evening, figured I’d check in on how the team was doing. Pulled out my phone, you know, tapped on the usual app I use for scores. And wouldn’t you know it, first thing that pops up is an ad. Fine. Close it. Try to get to the scores. Another ad. Okay, whatever. Then the darn thing is just spinning, trying to load. Come on already!
It just got me thinking, you know? About how we’ve got all this tech, and sometimes it still feels like pulling teeth to get a simple piece of information. It really threw me back to this one time, years ago. It wasn’t just any game; it was a huge Ole Miss game, one of those conference deciders, and the whole family was invested, especially my grandpa.
See, I was stuck out of town for this work thing I absolutely couldn’t skip. And my grandpa, bless him, he wasn’t great with smartphones or finding scores online himself. He was old school. He relied on me to be his eyes and ears for the game. He’d call me, all anxious, asking for updates. “What’s the score, son? Are we up?” That kind of thing.
The problem was, the place I was staying had the worst cell service imaginable. I mean, I had to stand by the window, practically holding my phone up to the sky, just to get one shaky bar. And the hotel Wi-Fi? Forget about it. Kept dropping. So, I’m there, desperately trying to refresh the score on my phone, which felt like it was powered by a hamster on a wheel. The app would freeze. The page wouldn’t load. It was maddening.
Every time I managed to get a score, I’d try to text it to him, but the texts would take forever to send, if they sent at all. He’d call again, sounding a bit more worried each time because he hadn’t heard from me. “Anything? Did they score?” And I’d feel just awful, like I was letting him down, all because this darn technology was failing me. It was one of those really tight games too, back and forth, the kind that gives you grey hairs. And there I was, feeling like I was in a tougher battle with my phone than the team was on the court.
I remember finally getting through with the final score – we won, thankfully! – and the relief in his voice was something else. But man, the stress of just trying to get that information, to share that moment, was insane.
So yeah, when I’m sitting there, waiting for a score to load on my fancy new phone, fighting through pop-up ads, a little part of me still remembers that struggle. Makes you think, doesn’t it? Sometimes the simplest things aren’t so simple. And it reminds me how much those shared moments, even just over a basketball score, really mean.
