Draft Night 2024

You may remember other draft night posts here, here, here and here.

And this year was a rather low key affair, given that 40% of the participants were on other continents (in 4 different time zones and with a total time difference spanning 19 whole Chilean hours), and 33% of the remaining participants were out of town. Add in some late working and a dental appointment straight from Hades itself, and suddenly, we were – quite literally – all over the place.

Still, the joint magic of football and technology pulled us all together in some shape and form, and it was 2 hours of good fun: a degree of silliness, some catching up, and equal amounts of ridicule and admiration of each other’s choices.

We’re playing Fantrax again this year, and – should you be interested – you can have a look at the selections that were made here. Do let me know who’s going to win the league, please.

After an uncomfortable night (the dentist one was me, see?), this morning started early with pool issues. One of the pipes on the cleaner had broken, and thus, I had to plunge – elbow-deep, nogal* – into the icy waters. I’m the only one that ever does these jobs. There was some posh chick floating around on an old door, but she said that there wasn’t room for both of us on there, and so I had to manage by myself.

It’s now mid-afternoon and I’m still shivering.

And, in an infrastructure maintenance follow-up, the solar people came to fix the solar. Nothing major, although it could have been. Just some loose bits after those winds on the weekend. The guys brought down a chunky bracket – 750g of premium aluminium – which had been twisted like the rules when a Big 6 club is playing. That’s been replaced now, and another couple of them added for good measure, but it does seem like we got away with one during the storms.

This afternoon: horseriding (not me), and this evening, football (me). Both of which events which have no occurred in quite a while, mainly (if not entirely) due to various reasons.

A busy day. Hence this blog post going out now.

Technology is great…

…when it works.

Draft night was good fun last night, but mere minutes before its conclusion, the technology decided to “roll back” the draft “up to and including round 1, pick 1”.

161 players were lost. Yes, including Mo Salah.

Fortunately, some much-appreciated manual labour by El Presidente means that we now find those 161 players reallocated to their respective fantasy teams and we go again this evening to fill the remaining 31 positions. Three of those picks are mine, and I have two surefire winners in mind. I’ll probably mess up the other one, as usual.

In tenuously related news, I paid for my pizza and beer last night with six R20 notes. That’s because technology is great when it works.
I drew R600 from the ATM on Monday, and every last Rand came out in R20 notes. We have R50s, R100s and even R200s, and you can work out many, many permutations making up 600 bucks… but oh no, I had to get thirty brown ones. Why would any machine think that was a good idea? Now my wallet is so full, it hurts when I sit on it, but I’m still not ever so rich.

Technology is great. When it works.