I pride myself on never having worked a desk job. I’ve never filed a paper, I’ve never missed getting ‘The Memo’ and I’ve never come home and complained about my boss. I take the unusual jobs ones that could never possibly induce stress. Specifically, jobs like refereeing intramural broomball games.
For those few who have never played broomball (there are 96 teams competing at Boston University this year), the game is simple. Imagine hockey played with a large rubber ball, yard-long sticks with triangular rubber paddles at the end and, of course, no ice skates.
That’s right. At any given time, there are 12 people running around on the ice at Walter Brown Arena, swinging at a rubber ball the size of a cantaloupe, missing badly and falling on their helmeted cabezas.
As a ref, I’m paid to skate around them only refs have skates and watch the spectacle unfold. I estimate that I see about 100 falls per game, and every one of those tumbles makes me chuckle deep down inside. I don’t know if I have a favorite type of faller whether I prefer to see the six-foot, two-inch scrawny guy slip and flail his arms over his head, throwing his stick 10 feet into the air and landing on his butt, or if I get more pleasure from seeing a four-foot, 10-inch freshman girl on a breakaway and then seeing her slip on the open ice crumbling into a pile while losing all hope for a scoring chance.
Our main job is to make sure people don’t hurt themselves when they fall. But accidents are bound to happen because as more than one brilliant player has remarked about the ice, ‘It’s slippery!’
Take, for instance, the guy who fell two weeks ago and dislocated his shoulder for the second time in two games. As he lay on the ice waiting for the medic, he winced and joked, ‘Well, I think I’m done for the season.’
But the career-ending injuries are few and far between. That’s in large part due to every referee’s hawk-like eye for unbuckled chinstraps. Hockey helmets have three straps that are very simple to attach if you’ve ever looked at a helmet for more than five seconds. The problem with helmets arises only because 90 percent of broomball players have never bothered to look at a helmet for two seconds. So we refs get to see a Picasso-esque arrangement of helmet straps the straps are all in the wrong places, but the concept of the helmet remains.
The most popular alternative helmet-fastening method is to loop the chinstrap around the back of the neck. But this doesn’t keep the helmet attached in any way, shape or form. So a referee has to always watch people’s helmets and, more often than not, strap the helmets on for the otherwise intelligent students.
Recently, when I informed a girl who was modeling the around-the-nape chinstrap about its potential peril, she responded with a sound of pathetic, crushed hope in her voice. ‘My teammate put it on. I don’t understand.’
The broomball ice also seems to make many students forget they are self-sufficient adults. Seconds before a face-off at center ice during a game on Sunday, a girl came up from behind me and raised her right foot to the level of my midsection.
‘Excuse me,’ she said sweetly. ‘Could you tie my shoe, please?’
‘Can’t you do that on your bench?’ I asked. I turned to one of her teammates and said, ‘I swear I’m not a babysitter.’
But who am I kidding? I’m basically watching over an elementary school recess, occasionally giving time-outs to the kids who push too much. Thank God I don’t have to deal with splinters.
I can’t complain too much because my job is so easy. If given the opportunity, an ice-skating dog could do my job. I get paid to skate around, blow my whistle every few minutes and watch brilliant biology majors jump onto the ice and suddenly become inept. I can sit back and watch engineering students who can’t figure out how to put on a helmet. It’s great for my self-esteem.
So go ahead, my fellow students. Take your jobs serving baked ziti in the dining hall or doing secretarial work in the School of Management. You do jobs that I’d never want. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch people fall on their asses and get paid for it.
The War Index: (91 Allied Soldiers Dead + 733 Iraqi Civilians Dead) x 15 days = 12,360 Death-Days.
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