This next entry is a follow-up from Karin's idea of my very own advice column, the new and profound Yo Phil. Should you have any question you wish to have answered, feel free to post a comment or send me a message. I probably will not post consistently (maybe once or twice a week, or less, or however much I feel like I can handle), but this one had a time constraint on it, so I felt compelled to answer it today.

(As a disclaimer, if you happen to be a manager and are reading this blog, I hope you have a sense of humor about yourself, and can laugh about the manager tendencies I describe below. You have been warned.)

This next query comes from 360's very own Sucka, the Bootyologist himself:

Yo Phil,

How in the hell did the committee give Tennessee a 2 seed and leave Arkansas out. Any Ideas about how my bracket should look? And what do I do about work for Thursday and Friday - feign sickness, or sneak in my mini TV?

Unbracketedly yours,

The Booty Bodhitsattva

Sucka,

So it would seem you have been presented with a multitude of dilemmas. In response to your first question, the answer probably lies in pronunciation. When presented with a teleprompter, the "new guy" did not want to screw up by loudly saying "ar-kansas" and thus making a complete and total fool of himself. In any event, your best bet with a scapegoat is to blame the new guy, regardless of whether or not he exists.

Brackets are a challenge, to say the least. For your bracket, I would hope yours had some of these, connected in some form or other and shown with names next to them:

{}
[]
------

Avoid the parentheses, (), as those things point you nowhere.

Regarding work, I would say the decision you make lies in what you want. To goof off at work, and make money, or to goof off at home (thereby saving sick days for another occasion). I think the former would be more of an adventure, and I'd also be willing to bet that you could rope your coworkers into the deal.

One option might be to call a last-second meeting for fellow employees, ignoring management and keeping them at bay by telling them you're having a "strategic planning" meeting. Be sure to mention that you're following up on their idea, because managers always love to hear praise about themselves, and they will not question you further on that point.

Another option might be to take the Ferris Buehler approach, and set up a dummy version of yourself, replete with clothing, and set your computer on timers so that things change periodically so that it appears to be making progress. For this to work, don't forget to change your settings so that the screen saver does not turn on and your computer does not go into sleep mode. Have the dummy appear extremely busy, and perhaps trigger a recording to have a generic conversation ("not now, I'm swamped"), that can be triggered if you were, say, tapped on the shoulder.

I hope that these ideas shed light on your course of action, and perhaps readers of this column might also be willing to share other ideas for you. I wish you all the best.

-Phil