Spoiler silliness

I had an interesting experience today, which was a bit of a flashback to my elementary school days where I was "the spoiler."  Generally, I ran my mouth a bit faster than I should have.  Anyway, I was on the train home with a couple of people from work on the train back and just heard her saying something about how relatively easy it was to not find out about the World Series.  Sadly, I missed the first part of the conversation where she must have been saying how she was trying to avoid the news.  I said I found that incredible since it was all over, and she was like "Dude."  Now I obviously wish I hadn't said anything, since I hardly care about sports at all and would have easily moved onto another topic.

However, it is completely unrealistic to expect that certain sporting events can be put on hold for 24 hours (ok, 20 hours) while you do other things (and then to try to shame people who tip you off accidentally!).  A typical game or a tv show, fine, but the outcome of the World Series, the Superbowl or especially the Stanley Cup?  What kind of a bubble are you living in?  It pretty much means no internet at all and absolutely no email, since even the subject line of messages from friends will most likely contain spoilers.  What I dislike the most about people who insist on a spoiler-free existence is that it squelches the water-cooler conversations that make up an important part of office life.  In a way it is actually quite selfish to try to maintain this bubble, particularly for really key events that are meant to be discussed openly, such as the World Series.  Now I don't want to go too far in condemning the anti-spoiler squad, but it does strike me as one more example of the extreme atomization of society that we are facing that people think that can insist on time-shifting events to suit their own needs and getting everyone else to play along and humour them.

That said, I wouldn't have said anything (and I really said next to nothing about the game) had I known that she really didn't want to know.  And of course, I will continue to put up spoiler warnings here for the plots of books and obscure movies, given that it is fairly unlikely everyone (anyone?) will have already experienced them.  But I am not going to tiptoe around discussing the outcomes of sporting events if it is actually relevant to the topic under discussion.