Justification for higher education

Back in March, as some of you may remember, I switched jobs moving from a big company (12k-plus employees) to a much smaller company (500 or so employees). This was forced upon me by the old company’s (let’s just say its acronym is a homonym for a type of tan-ish fabric) inability to win the re-compete for the contract I was working on.

Lazy bastards.

In the past six months I’ve come to really like my new company. It’s consistently rated as one of the best places to work in D.C. and I can see why. One of the best reasons I’ve found so far is the company’s season tickets at Nationals Park work their way through the rotation a whole lot quicker.

On Wednesday, my boss called to see if I wanted to go to the game that night and, having nothing else to do that evening except contemplate my navel, I said “Sure, no problem.” He told me the tickets were in the top drawer of his desk and just asked that I not scalp them. Not that I’d do that of course but, after opening the envelope I found in his desk, I understood the warning. Here’s why:

It’s not often you get offered four, fifth-row, behind home plate tickets. Except for some of the tickets I got for Heels’ games in the Dean Dome (front row, behind the goal, SCORE!) these were probably the best tickets I’ve ever had in my life. And best of all, they were free (just like the food that was served to us in our 22-inch-wide padded seats).

Seriously. I’ve never actually had to go down before to get to my seats at a baseball park. The climb to my seats, usually halfway to the stratosphere, was an integral part of the game for me. To get to our seats we had to ride the elevator down and then go through this door:

which was guarded by not one, but two very large men.

I’m not kidding with the title of this post, seats like these are seriously a justification for higher education, cause trust me baby, these seats ain’t cheap. As a comparison, I just bought four pairs of tickets to Caps games this winter all of them cost me only marginally more than just one of the tickets I used on Wednesday.

These seats confirmed something I already knew: Nationals Park is one of the nicest places around to watch baseball. It's just a pretty, well thought out stadium. This is a good thing because the team sucks so bad the Nats are almost painful to watch and the folks running the stadium do their best to make watching a bad team even harder.

Anyway, here’s a couple more shots from Section E, Row E, Seat 3:

Shortly after this picture was taken, Abe cut blocked Tom and both of them ended up on their asses. Tom still won the race.

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Technically, this one wasn't taken from our seats, but it's pretty close

A view into the secret world of the goings on in the Nats' dugout

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Adam Dunn watching Cristian Guzman watch one go by

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And while I won’t say leaving the park that night was difficult cause, c’mon, the Nats lost again, I do look forward to the next time the boss calls.

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