An Egregious Breach of Protocol

GUILTY!!! Everyone in this picture...

People who have been with LTA long enough, know exactly what I ask for every Christmas. It’s very simple.

I ask that people not to divert time or money from more important things to get me a present. I ask that people realize that the help LTA gets throughout the year is possibly more than I deserve. I ask people to believe that any effort expended in second guessing what more I need in my life is a misallocation of resources.  

So people know better than to get me a Christmas present.

Usually.

This year there was a flagrant disregard for my clearly stated desires.

And, let me tell you…

It was awesome!

I wanted to use the first blog post of the year to thank everyone who allowed their image to be captured and helped produce one of the greatest gifts of recent memory, the one of a kind, hand crafted, LTA Probability Management edition of the game Guess Who.

Perfect in so many ways...

If for nothing else, it will be a cherished time capsule. As the years sneak by, LTA does change a little here or there. For whatever reason, we are blessed with extremely low turnover. Nonetheless, people do occasionally move on. New faces pop up. 

But this game is now a permanent snapshot of who we were in 2024. I hope you have some idea of what joy I will get when I rediscover it in my closet when I am 70, when I think back to this best of times and the people I got to spend it with. Sorry if that’s sappy. But it will be a wonderful memory.

And what really surprised me about the game itself was how fun it actually was. I’m a bit of a board game snob and I didn’t think that I would enjoy something so simple. But having all of you as part of the game made it quite different.

The way the game works you have to figure out whose character your opponent has by asking yes or no questions. Is your character wearing glasses? Does your character have dark hair? Generic things.

But with the LTA edition it becomes a little more interesting.

New questions unlocked...

With a game made up of people that we know so well, the questions don't have to be boring.

Obviously some questions are too specific to be useful. If it only applies to 1 person you won't get enough information: Does this person retire frequently but still end up on payroll for some reason?

And questions that apply to too many people are also useless: Is this person valued for everything they bring to LTA every single day they show up?

But there are definitely questions that hit the sweet spot of applying to just enough people but not too many: Is this person likely to miss copious amount of work thanks to Orlando? Is this person likely to have deposited 30% of their profit sharing bonus at the Hard Rock?

So long story short, Christi and I had a blast playing.

Thank you so much for making this Christmas memorable!

(Please don’t let it happen again.)

ALSO, while we’re here…

Every year I forget to put together the LTA Super Bowl squares until around the 5th inning of the game. This year though, I promise to have our squares done before the tip off. Everyone can get 3 squares and we’ll still have some squares left. So anyone who wants a bonus square please say so in the comments below.

First come first serve.