Ok, so this isn’t new new (why on earth are you getting news from EDSBS in the first place?) but it’s worth talking about.
There is a man at the State basketball game reading his Volvo's owner's manual. Rock. Bottom. pic.twitter.com/IoSYIypiP5
— Whit Salmon (@whitsalmon) February 18, 2017
This man is not the first person to blatantly ignore the sporting event he’s voluntarily attended. There are undoubtedly other people at this game on Instagram, or playing Two Dots, or sexting. (People are always sexting, regardless of their surroundings.) These distractions exist on a hazy sliding scale. Scrolling through Twitter during a time out? That’s fine. Pulling out a novel in the middle of the game? Pretty weird, guy.
A Volvo owner’s manual is on a whoooooole different level. Let us examine why.
1. ACCESSIBILITY OF MATERIAL
When a Northwestern student starts digging into Machiavelli in the middle of a football game, you don’t wonder why he had The Prince in the first place. He’s a student, and students carry around books for classes. Or when those Mizzou fans decided to watch the Cardinals, well, it’s not like they dragged TVs into the concourse themselves.
Nobody carries their owner’s manual around. It lives in your car, in the glove compartment, because the two go together. Either this man was already so dismissive about the game that, finding no better option available in his car, he intentionally brought the manual with him OR he left the game at some point to get the manual and then came back. This wasn’t opportunistic. It was absolutely premeditated.
2. ENJOYMENT OF MATERIAL
I like books. I like watching movies. Regrettably, I even sort of enjoy social media. I can absolutely see how any of these could be more pleasant than watching NC State lose a seventh straight game. Sports are not so uniformly engrossing that they can’t be surpassed by other options. Hell, Spencer and I spent the second half of the 2013 Sugar Bowl talking about Big Tymers videos.
But a Volvo manual? I can’t imagine being so bored at a basketball game that I don’t leave but do start poring over the section on Replacing Brake Rotors. Buddy, you are making a STATEMENT about how dull you think this game is.
3. THE PURITY OF THE MOMENT
Take the same act, but replace this man with someone in their twenties, and I’m calling attention-grabbing Internet bullshit. Two days later, we’d get a follow-up story about how Volvo’s social media team planted this person as part of a brand awareness memepaign.
Not here. My guy has no intention of turning this into a Twitter parody account or meeting Jimmy Fallon. He probably leaves comments on corporate restaurant Facebook pages like “it was really cold last time we had dinner there” or “bring back the broccoli cheese soup now!!” This was just a man, bored to tears at a basketball game, and diving headfirst into Inflation Pressure guidelines.
He is my hero.