工作時間看世界盃的樂趣

I’ve been a World Cup enthusiast for longer than I care to admit, but I still don’t consider myself any kind of expert on soccer.

I have, however, become an expert on watching World Cup matches during work hours.

I’m taking the risk of getting fired for that last sentence becausesomebody needs to point out that we’re presently experiencing the most watch-at-work-friendly World Cup ever. (Even the cultural authority Google Doodles has tacitly acknowledged as much. See below.) And it’s all thanks to the technological evolution in the ways we watch, communicate, and bond.

My Cup obsession began at a time when catching every game meant watching a fair number of them on Spanish-language cable. By the time I entered the work force and moved to New York in the mid-1990s, the Cup was more thoroughly covered in all the languages I’m fluent in (English) through cable packages available in many homes and not a few sports bars.

The problem: Depending on the host nation, crucial Cup games often unfold at some moment inconveniently situated between 9 am and 5 pm US time. In the old days, the only solution involved physically sneaking out of the office and decamping for two hours or more with workplace confederates — almost certainly in a place where beer is sold.

This was always fun, but side effects included 15 voicemails from the boss and the need for a short nap before answering any of them.

Gradually, as connection speeds improved, the Internet became a plausible alternative. But access to any particular match could be a crapshoot. And, even in the best scenario, it’s not easy to follow a contest in one browser window while convincingly interacting with something that resembles work elsewhere on one’s desktop.

This year is different. Crucially: The iPad, and the entire tablet market that it helped popularized, have gone from novelty to routine tool — with a fairly robust app ecosystem to support their use. I can’t set up a TV on my desk. But an iPad? No biggie. And those of you in more Orwellian workplaces can even resort to a smartphone.

Yahoo has already told you how to watch the tournament online, so I’ll just add that my extensive, uh, testing has determined that the Watch ESPN app works very nicely.

And, happily, soccer is well suited to continuous partial attention. Zone in on work, and the occasional bursts of crowd excitement prompt a shifted glance to innumerable replays. If work is under control and it’s time to “look busy,” take some minutes to luxuriate in the athleticism and precision of the most popular sport in the world.

Meanwhile, the culture and tools around instant messaging and social media and even company-mandated internal communication systems have made it way easier to bond with fellow Cup fanatics in real time.

I won’t out any virtual confederate co-worker here. But I’ll offer a social media example. A slow point in my workday overlapped with the Uruguay-England match recently, and I informed Twitter that in my opinion the Uruguayan jerseys are simply too tight.

Unlike the 99 percent of my tweets that are totally ignored, this one quickly sparked a sympathetic (and hilarious) conversation — it wasalmost like connecting with a random work-shirking stranger in a bar.

Look, I won’t lie. It’s still more fun to play outright hooky with a band of similarly reckless colleagues who don’t mind leaving their desks empty and their phones ringing to watch a competition between the national teams of two countries none of us has visited, all in hopes of collectively screaming “Gooooooooooaaaaaaaal!” Particularly if there’s also beer.

But we don’t live in a perfect world, do we? There’s work to be done. And, as never before, we have at our disposal the tools to look like we’re doing it — even as we’re IMing our secret World Cup fan clique, drunk only on the excitement of any given contest: “Gooooooooooaaaaaaaal!”我是一個世界盃球迷，時間長得連我自己都懶得提了，但我仍然不認爲我是足球方面的專家。

但是，我已經成爲工作時間看世界盃的專家。

爲了這句話，我承受着被解僱的風險，因爲有人會說現在的世界盃比任何時候都適合工作時間看。（就連文化方面的專家谷歌主頁的Logo塗鴉也默默地認同了這一說法。詳見下文。）多虧了技術的發展，我們看電視、交流和聯繫的方式也有了進步。

追一場球賽就意味着可以在西班牙語的電臺看到一羣養眼的帥哥，那時我就開始愛上了世界盃。20世紀90年代中期，我參加工作，搬到了紐約。那時世界盃的覆蓋範圍開始擴大，可以用我能流利使用的所有語言（英語）收看到，只要家裏有無限電纜就可以收看到，而不僅僅侷限在一些運動型酒吧。

問題是：由於主辦國時差問題，關鍵性的幾場比賽常常在美國時間早上9點到下午5點，剛好是上班時間不方便觀看。過去，唯一的解決方法就是偷偷溜出辦公室，和同事悄悄消失2個多小時，當然我們一般都會去有啤酒賣的地方。

那時總是很有趣，但是後果就是收到老闆的15個電話留言，而且在回覆留言之前需要小憩一會兒。

慢慢地，隨着網速提升，互聯網開始成爲一個不錯的選擇。但是能夠看到任何一場比賽都是撞大運的事兒。何況即使在最理想的情況下，想在臺式機上既用瀏覽器看比賽又做出認真工作的樣子可沒那麼簡單。

今年情況有所不同。關鍵在於：iPad的出現，以及由它帶動的整個平板電腦市場。從剛一開始它們還是新鮮事物，現在已經成爲常用設備——還有一個充滿活力的應用程序系統，爲它們提供支持。我不能在辦公桌上安一臺電視機，但是一臺iPad總可以吧？這又不是很佔空間的東西。再不濟，如果你公司的管理嚴格，你也可以在智能手機上看吧。

雅虎已經教你怎樣在網上看世界盃了，所以我只是補充一下我多次試驗的經驗就是Watch ESPN這個應用程序效果非常好。

令人高興的還有一點，就是足球不需要一直全神貫注地看。重新投入工作，以及觀衆時而發出的歡呼可以轉移你的注意力，讓你回頭去看無限次回放。如果你的工作已經完全在你掌控範圍之內，那麼是時候讓自己“看上去忙碌一點”，花幾分鐘享受運動員精神以及世界上最流行的運動的精髓吧！

此外，即時通訊工具，社交媒體，甚至於每個公司都有的內部溝通系統讓我們和跟自己一樣的世界盃腦殘粉實時交流更加順暢。

我不會供出我在網絡上一起看球的同事。但是我舉個社交網絡上的例子。最近，因爲工作上一件不太緊急的事跟烏拉圭對英格蘭那場比賽衝突了，我就在推特上發了一條狀態，說烏拉圭的運動衫太緊了。

我發的推特99%都會被無視，這一次卻迅速激起了熱烈討論——就跟在酒吧裏偶遇一個同樣是從辦公室逃出來的陌生人聊天一樣。

我不會撒謊。和一幫臭味相投，不管辦公桌是不是沒有人，無視手機來電的熱血同事逃出來看我們從未去過的兩個國家踢球，我們只有一個想法，就是一起喊“進球！進球！”這種經歷仍然有趣得多。當然，如果有啤酒就更好了。

但是我們生活的世界並沒有如此完美不是嗎？工作還是需要完成。跟以前不一樣的是我們可以隨心所欲地使用一些工具，讓我們即使是在跟世界盃球迷發送祕密短信，也看上去好像是在工作一樣。任何一場比賽都能讓我們歡呼雀躍隨之開懷暢飲。“進球！進球！”