So, Yahoo screwed us. Hey, that’s a fun way to start a post, isn’t it?!

Long story short, Yahoo glitched and switched the scoring system for our first group, so I’m gonna be treating each group separately and giving out two first place prizes and two second places prizes. I know, I know, I rock.

Short story long, click below to read more.

For the first time in years, I spent more time on the opening of March Madness doing something else other than watching the games: haggling with Yahoo’s tech support (what an oxymoronic term), which is about as helpful as a drunken monkey. Basically, what I noticed this afternoon was that the system had glitched and our first group in the contest had its scoring system changed. The second group was right as rain though. As you can imagine, this makes it hard to try and treat both groups as one if they’re not using the same scoring system!

The first group is now using a Seed Difference bonus for upsets instead of the flat 1 point bonus that I selected. What that means is that if you, say, correctly picked a 10 seed to beat a 7 seed, then you’d get the difference in seeds (3) as a bonus. This is not the scoring I wanted. This is not the scoring I selected. And yet Yahoo was kind enough to override my choice for us. Gee golly, isn’t technology fun! (…where’s my flask)

So what am I going to do? Give away more prizes! I’ll now treat each group separately and give away two first place prizes of $50 and two second place prizes of $25. It’s more than I’d planned to give out, but it’s really the only fair way to solve the problem. Plus, I enjoy being fair and upfront with y’all. The only alternative is to manually score all 460+ brackets of the first group and that’s…oh man. No thanks.

And as a side note, because I’m feeling ranty, let me give some unsolicited advice to Yahoo that’s surely to go ignored, if not unnoticed. Look, this is the second year in a row that we’ve had a problem with the HIF March Madness Contest. Last year was all me though and you know what I did? Admitted that I’d screwed up and found a solution for the problem. I’d be awesome if you could do the same. I know the “tech support” people I “talked” to with intervals of 2 hours between each e-mail correspondence are doing their best, but repeatedly having them copy and paste the same canned response that “there’s nothing we can do” is complete bull. One click of a button and the scoring system is changed back to what I had it set at. And while we’re on the topic of tech support, do you know what they developed almost a decade ago? Live chat tech support. It’s highly efficient and provides for a high customer satisfaction rate. You should totally look into it.

Ok,