With only three days between Sunday evening’s announcement of the NCAA Tournament brackets and the beginning of action on Thursday, Jeff Reiss has been working tirelessly in order to set up his company’s tournament pool – at work almost two hours early on Monday and staying late every day so far this week. In short, he’s working much harder on organizing and running the office pool than he ever has at his actual job.

            “I’ve noticed a definite hop in his step this week,” said Nicole Smith, who works in the cubicle beside Reiss. “He really seems to want to be here – he’s running around, very alert and busy. Usually he just sits slumped in front of his computer with a glazed look on his face not really seeming to be doing anything at all.”

            Reiss, an assistant software programmer, arrived at work on Monday morning just after 7:00 a.m. to send out a company-wide e-mail about the tournament pool. He then set to making copies of the bracket and left one on the desks of all his employees. Only then to he go online and begin researching is own tournament picks, which lasted the rest of the day, interspersed with answering any office pool questions his co-workers e-mailed him.

            Yesterday he split his day between tracking down fellow employees to remind them of the Thursday noon deadline and doing more research for his picks.  He plans more of the same for today.

            “Thursday is when my work day will get really hectic,” said Reiss. “First I need to make sure I have all of the brackets and all of the money. Then, once the games start, I’ll be monitoring all of them online, and then making updates to the brackets. Then I have to send out a company-wide updates at the end of the day, in addition to answering individual queries. I have a lot of long days ahead of me, I’m afraid. That’s why I’ve postponed all of my client and vendor meetings and calls until mid-April.”

            Friday will be just as busy as Thursday for Reiss. And then comes the Round of 32 over the weekend.

            “The company doesn’t want us to work over the weekend, but when a project needs to get done, it needs to get done,” said Reiss. “That’s how this weekend will be. I’m going to be up working really late on Sunday and then back in here early Monday morning to update all the brackets, because I know people are going to want to know where they stand when they get to work on Monday.”

            Reiss’s hard work hasn’t gone unnoticed by his superiors.

            “This is the kind of work we’ve wanted out of Jeff all along,” said Gary Conner, the company vice president who oversees the programming department. “He’s been here for three years now and this is the first time we’ve ever seen him show any excitement or dedication to anything. It’s a breath of fresh air. If this keeps up throughout the whole tournament, we’re thinking of calling him in to tell him that if he would only put forward a tenth of the effort to his job as he does to running the tournament pool, he’d get a promotion.”

            But like any good, dedicated employee, Reiss said he is doing it for the love of the job, not for the promise of a promotion or a raise.

            “Every single morning I wake up dreading coming into this office to do this job. I despise it,” said Reiss. “But at least now with the NCAA Tournament and having this pool to run, I know that at least for the next three weeks I have something remotely enjoyable to look forward to. Plus, I can’t believe they haven’t fired me yet. I figure doing this at least gives me a three-week stay of execution. Especially since my boss went in for three brackets.”