Day Soda #5: Bocce Recap

Plus: a controversy in the audiophile community

As I mentioned in last month’s Day Soda, I’ve been recruited to play for the official workplace bocce ball team at Retirable, a company full of some old friends from my job at Policygenius and my wife’s current employer. Each week, Tyler, their fearless leader and 19th subscriber to Night Water, writes up a post-game recap.

It was my honor to guest-write week 4 of the Official Retirable Bocce Ball Recap, and to re-publish it here on Day Soda for your entertainment. A decent-enough portion of these jokes will not make sense to people who don’t work at Retirable, but I wrote 1200+ words of bocce recap last week and need to repurpose it somehow for my own sanity.

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Subject: Bocce Ball Write-Up, Week 4

I woke up this morning in the middle of an empty field beside a highway in New Jersey with nothing but a Retirable Hawaiian shirt on my back. My pockets were completely empty—no wallet, no phone, no chapstick—except for chicken scratch scribbles on scraps of paper, perhaps ten or fifteen different scraps with no semblance of order to them.

How did I get here? And how would I get home in time to write and send the bocce write-up?

I racked my brain trying to piece together moments from the night before. I remembered showing up at the bocce court and shaking the hand of a stranger who then furtively passed an open box of anti-aging supplements to Retirable CEO R. Tyler End. What was in the supplement? Did we mix the powder into our 24-ounce cans of Stella? Was the supplement the reason for my extreme memory loss and trip to Jersey? Or was it the single Stella?

Luckily, the scraps of paper held some answers. I had been dutifully taking notes on the events of the evening, as is my custom, most of which were represented on these malformed pieces of paper. I read through them, attempting to put some order to the contextless notes and recreate my memories.

What follows is my attempt to describe the Ball and Chains’ Week 4 match against Macaroni and Boccese. If you are reading this right now, I have either made my way back home or a kind stranger has found my notes and digitized them as a part of an investigation into my disappearance. Either way, I hope this email entertains.