Can Bracket Madness Be Dangerous?

I once met somebody who worked for a company that designed airplane parts. She said the most dangerous day of the year was the Monday before the college basketball tournament, because everybody in the firm – for that matter, most Americans with access to a computer – was busy filling out brackets.

It was bad enough that the company computers ran slow, she said – everybody ducking low in their cubicles, looking for upsets.

What made it worse, she said, was that she suspected the intricate calculations were affected by the preoccupation with the madness. Mistakes were being made on slow computers, she feared. And what if they affected the curve of a wing, the snugness of a rivet?

It was like the old automotive truism about not buying a car built on Monday. And for that matter, don’t buy a car built on Friday. Now we had to worry about airplanes planned on the Monday of madness?

I have no way of knowing how right she was. (She was not a sports fan, I got that point pretty clearly.)

However, I was reminded of that conversation on Monday when I filed what I thought was a fairly lucid critique of the HBO film about the 2008 McCain-Palin campaign.

The hits for that posting were 300 percent below my normal cadre of staunch loyalists.

Where was everybody? Picking Syracuse to go all the way before Fab Melo was dropped for academic deficiencies?

Maybe nothing will be normal for the next three weeks. Sunspots? Global warming? No, the N.C.A.A. tournament.

I’m watching Napoli-Chelsea on Wednesday, not filing.

Just hope that woman from the aviation company was exaggerating.