This morning, my husband took his annual mission to the mall’s calendar kiosk to pick up his “Star Trek: Ships of the Line” calendar for 50% off. While there, he found a Buffalo Bills calendar located in the depths of the “random team” pile, left lonely with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Florida Panthers and Toronto Raptors calendars.
“Look what I found,” he said eagerly, handing me the calendar.
“The Buffalo Bills, a year in futility,” I smirked. “Sure, let’s get it.”
I didn’t look closely at the calendar until I got back to our apartment. I hold onto my mother’s old superstition that you are not to open a calendar until New Year’s Day, so I wasn’t about to tear off the plastic. Instead, I took a more careful look at the back, which previews every month’s cover athlete.
Hey, it’s Marshawn Lynch! And Bill Belichick’s favorite, Josh Reed! (In case you missed it, check out that link for Belichick’s Reed gaffe from last week.) There’s Shawn Nelson and Roscoe Parrish!
Four of the twelve months of my 2011 Buffalo Bills calendar are absolutely pointless. Lynch, Reed, and Nelson are no longer Bills, and Parrish is on the injured reserve (something no calendar designer could have foreseen, I know.) Two of the others, Lee Evans and Donte Whitner, most likely will not be Bills beyond the first week of 2011.
So half of my Bills calendar could be rendered obsolete by the second week of 2011.
But I don’t blame the calendar’s manufacturer, Turner Licensing. The life of a calendar creator must be difficult these days; your chosen product is consistently threatened by Microsoft Outlook, iCal, Blackberry Calendar, whatever those crazy Droid’s use, and the fact that you can Google “January 2011 calendar” and print out a calendar grid on the office printer for free. Your calendar pages must be prepared months in advance in order to be printed in time for Christmas gift-giving – fine when you’re selling the “Cute Kittens in Teacups” calendar, but a liability when you’re in the sports calendar business. Players get traded, hurt, jailed or, in the case of a one Brett Favre, decide to come out of retirement a week before the season begins.
Thus, I’m not blaming the calendar maker. The have a job not unlike the newspaper journalist, working in a print medium in an internet age. Print prematures the aging of news, and in this case, calendars. Much like newspapers are evolving, maybe the calendar maker needs to change their business model as well.
Here’s my idea for the calendar industry. Either focus on game highlight photos from the previous season or all-time best games so you don’t have the departed athlete issue to begin with, or let us register our calendars online and send us replacement photos via email or mail.
As for me, I’ll just print out Ryan Fitzpatrick and Stevie Johnson photos to tape over the months with Lynch and Reed. Because being a Bills fan seems to be all about improvising at times.