The Slice: Realistically, you can’t postpone all your meetings until October

Here is my seven-step plan to keep from becoming one of those guys who spends half the day at work monitoring baseball games on various digital devices.

• Remind self of terms of employment – expectations of daily work product, et cetera.

• Have someone who knows how to do it block access to www.espn.com and other porn sites.

• Remind self of the glacial pace of baseball. Think of what work tasks could be accomplished in the time it takes a batter to foul off nine straight pitches.

• Surrender any and all ambitions of keeping up with a former colleague (let’s call him Ryan “Metrics” Pitts) who manages to maintain absolute and total real-time awareness of everything happening in baseball all day, every day.

• Come to grips with the fact that co-workers seated nearby do not wish to hear “Oh, for the love of …” every time a certain team’s bullpen gives up a lead.

• Answer one question: Do the roller-coaster mood swings attendant to monitoring a nine-inning game hinder one’s ability to concentrate on job-related tasks?

• Face the fact that checking on a game 167 times during a work shift suggests that my claim to have lost interest in baseball since the Spokane Indians stopped being AAA is a bit of a pose.

Re: The No. 1 song on the day you were born: Several readers who went to that this-date-in-music website mentioned in The Slice the other day – http://playback.fm/birthday-song – reported their findings.

For instance, Sandpoint’s Peter Lucht discovered that the No. 1 hit on the day he was born was “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.”

“I was hoping for a more substantial song.”

(Well, the kid who sang that did grow up to marry Batgirl. So there’s that.)

Lucht also looked up the No. 1 song for the estimated date of his conception. “That was ‘Wheel of Fortune’ by Kay Starr. I don’t remember hearing that one at all. Maybe my parents had the radio turned off.”

Today’s Slice question: In terms of how things have gone for you, what letter grade would you award to the first 100 days of 2015?