If putting e-mail contacts into the database I am collecting during a football game was easy, doing the same during coverage of the U.S. presidential election was anything but. You could make the argument that this event is a lot like a sporting contest, except that determining a winner between Donald Trump and Joe Biden will have a much greater impact on you and me than would the Buccaneers and Giants fighting it out as they did twenty-four hours ago. That is not meant to be a political statement one way or another, it is the honest-to-goodness truth. So I am following this very closely while trying to do a little work at the same time. The challenge of tonight is a reminder of why I do not do this very often.
There are undoubtedly some of you wondering what any of this has to do with sports and I want to reiterate my position from a couple of nights ago that I was going to focus my journal on working around everything that is happening right now. There is only so much I can say about typing hundreds of e-mail addresses into an Excel spreadsheet. You find the information and transpose it to the document, that is all there really is to it. I cannot fill 250 words describing a fairly simple task. It is honestly not that exciting. Adding in elements like doing so during an election in the middle of a pandemic, however, makes it sound a little more interesting. And make no mistake, it is a challenge that I must endure to get to the finish line.