Saturday, July 9, 2011

Caption Woe #2: Why Baseball Games Give Me Tourettes

I recently had the pleasure of captioning a White Sox baseball game for four and a half hours. Every third word out of my mouth came up incorrectly. It felt like trying to talk to someone who'd shoved rocks in their ears and as a result was unable to understand anything clear beyond basic articles like "it", "a" or "the".
The program is especially fond of interchanging in/and. All night long it switched out simple, easy-to-comprehend words with the most non-sequitur, random, totally dissimilar substitutions:

Elks for outs.
Rounds for runs
She for he. 
To for two/2
Clinton for Quentin (Last name of a player)
Terrible for durable
_______ for fingers...I can't remember what it kept replacing for fingers and it's probably best that I don't.
He gun; He's gone; She's gonna; Key gun; for "he gone". Yup. I had to repeat "he gone" five times before it finally got it right. But when I whispered "unbelievable" under my breathe in exasperation, PERFECTION. How it taunts me.

Somewhere between the second "elk", the fifth "she" and the "terrible" player, I finally gave up speaking altogether and typed out every word. Understandbly, this resulted in countless Jesus-Christ's spewing out of my mouth, sometimes with a creative middle name added in-between. (No, it wasn't Heratio and it ended in "ing".) I just hope all the drunken bar flies watching the game Friday nights appreciate what captions we can provide under the oppressive thumb of the program's idiocy.

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