[BretMan]

Going to the wrong field sounds bad, but if you work over a hundred games a year at maybe three dozen different fields the possibility of it happening increases!

I've caught myself driving to the wrong park before, realized it before I got there, made a quick detour and made it on time. Luckily, I had plenty of time to get to the right place.

This past spring, I almost screwed up big time! I had a high school game in an area of town I'm not too familiar with. Within a few miles of each other were schools named East High School and another named Eastmoor High School. I thought the game was at East, but it was actually at Eastmoor!

I had my MapQuest map to East and just enough time to get there in rush hour traffic. On the way to the game, my assignor called my cell to tell me that my game at Eastmoor had been cancelled and offered me another assignment with a later start time. That's when it dawned on me that I was heading to the wrong school and would have been terribly late to the right one. Talk about dodging a bullet!

Other than that one near-miss, of the hundred-plus games I've worked this year I haven't been late for or missed any of them!

I did have one local league playoff game this year where my partner- a very reliable guy- called me about 15 minutes before game time and asked, kind of irritated, why I wasn't at the field for our game. Told him to check his schedule- I was at the right field, he was at the wrong one!