Riding in the Bucket

Bobgirrl on the Bucket Boys of dating:

think I may have met a new member of possibly bucket #1, quite likely bucket #2, and probably bucket #4. You remember the buckets, don’t you? For those who are uninitiated and those just too lazy to follow the link, let me ’splain. You see, dear reader, it seems that all of the men I meet fall into one of four buckets:

Bucket #1: Unhappily married (whether they know it or not)
Bucket #2: Mentally unstable

Bucket #3: Gay (whether they know it or not)

Bucket #4: Some or all of the above

This gave me a good chuckle, but not for the reason Bobgirrl was necessarily going for: we rowed in college, and in an 8 the standard way to configure the boat was a stagger of ports and starboard oars, counting back from 8 in back as the leader to 1 in the bow. For reasons unclear to mortal men, our Coach prefered a rig which went port/starboard/port/starboard/starboard/port/starboard/port--ie the guys in the 5 and 4 seats are both rowing the same side. For whatever reason, we dubbed this rig "The Bucket" and if you were in the 5 seat you were the top half of the Bucket, and if you were the 4 seat you were the bottom of the bucket.

Needless to say, I spent a lot of time in the 4 seat.

So, in this era of sensless and malicious outing of people's sordid pasts, I'll act preemptively: yes, in college, one of my nicknames was "Bucket Butt."

Talk about your aggressive, umm, profiling.

That is all.

UPDATE: At least I can hold my head up high and say unequivocally that I never lost a seat race to a peanut butter sandwich.

It was a fluffernutter, you damn jackals! Get your stories straight.

Yips! from Robbo, Collegiate Nostalgia Dept.: As I really was too small for crew but too pig-headed to admit it at the time, I spent the vast majority of my rowing career as the Bow Baby. (Fortunately, my nickname on the team was "Whammer" so I never was never dubbed for my seat. Why Whammer? Well, that's a story for another time.)

I've got just two words why I thank God I never spent any time in the bucket: "Jerr" and "Bear".

That is all.