Karma Police (arrest this man)

As I sit here on the back of West Ham dumping Man Utd out of the League Cup (by a scoreline of 4-0 nonetheless), instead of gloating about how well we played and sticking it to all those Man Utd fans out there, I am instead forced to reflect on my watching of the entire 90 minutes live on my computer by the questionable method of streaming.

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You may ask, why I am focussing on such an insignificant detail of what has been an all together glorious night of football for my team.  West Ham actually won, Man Utd finally lost and Jonathan Spector actually played half decent! The answer is, I am now feeling incredibly guilty about the whole affair.  You see, unfortunately streaming is illegal (or at the very least, highly unethical)!  Admittedly, it’s legality is really only on a par with going 35mph in a 30 or dumping dog waste in the normal street bins.  However, it’s still technically wrong and my issue lies in the fact that my concious is heavily swayed by a fickle beast called karma.

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I’m not the type of person who thinks something is wrong or bad because I believe the law is there for a reason and that everyone must adhere to it.  No…. my logic lies in the complexities of karma and how if you knowingly do something bad then something bad will happen to you in return.  It’s a frustrating mindset to have and one that I have spent years trying to reason myself out of and create loopholes for.  The truth is, my concious is driven by fear… the fear that if I do something wrong then something wrong will happen to me.  Only I’ve taken it to extremes… I can’t speed anywhere without fearing that something bad will happen when I get there.  I can’t steal food out of the window at work (like everybody else does) without fearing that it will end up costing me in tips.  I can’t stream the West Ham matches at the weekend for fear that West Ham will end up losing (ohh the frickin irony)!

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It’s nuts I know and the mechanics behind my thinking are way too convoluted and long winded to be laid out here.  Instead, I will bring you back to my thought processes behind tonight and how after many months of resisting the temptation to watch the football on my computer, I finally succumbed.  My intention was to eat dinner at mine with Nik then make the treacherous journey through the snow back to my parents house to watch the game live on Sky Sports.  However, with the snow being so bad today, dinner ended up being late and by the time I finished eating the game was already 15 minutes old.  At this point, I thought to myself is it worth walking for 30 minutes in the snow just to watch the last half of a game we will more than likely lose only to trudge another 30 minutes to get back again?  I checked the score on the bbc website at this point and the game was going ahead.  I started to reason with myself on how I could get away with watching it on my computer without having to step out into the cold.  Finally, I came to the conclusion that because we have Sky at my parents house I should technically be allowed to stream it off of Sky via my computer.  This is because I was going to watch it anyway and it is only the bad weather that is stopping me.  Case closed.  Game on.

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If I’m honest, I didn’t expect us to win the game and thought streaming it illegally wouldn’t make any difference.  Then we only go and win the bloody thing (convincingly I might add), something I never saw coming.  Now I’m left feeling slightly guilty and have a worrying feeling in my gut about what is going to happen next…