I have used a Franklin Planner since the late 1980’s at work. I use it to keep up with appointments and tasks for work activities as well as my personal life. Over the years, I have come to rely on computers and tools like Outlook to manage my time but I still carry a planner. I still find it useful and enjoy going back to look at my past.
Most of the years, I have used the standard green shaded pages with a daily quote from some noteworthy person at the top of the notes page. In the late 1990’s, the Franklin Planner people made available filler pages that featured Dilbert comic strips. This was right around the time that Dilbert was possibly at the height of its popularity. I read it regularly and it was one of my favorites. I think the Dilbert planner fillers were available for two years and I used them both years. At the end of 1999, I was ready to purchase my planner filler for 2000 and found out that Dilbert pages were no longer available. I enjoyed having something other than the standard green fillers but very few of the ones available for 2000 appealed to me. The cartoon related fillers they carried that year didn’t appeal to me. The only licensed product filler that appealed to me was the ESPN planner pages. I’m not a big sports fan, but I thought it might be worth checking out at least for a year.
When I got the planner filler, I took a closer look at the pages to seek what kind of information they included. I was impressed with the sports trivia that was at the bottom the notes page for each day. The trivia on these pages usually related to the types of sports taking place at that time. On the daily pages for the days of major sporting events that were set for specific days, they would note this information. For example, the page for September 15 noted that the Summer Olympics started on that day. Since the day the World Series started wouldn’t be known until the League championships were done, they couldn’t put this on the calendar. But the Super Bowl is an event that they know exactly when it will take place from the start of the season. As I write this, the 2015 Super Bowl will be played in two days on February 1. They already know that the 2016 Super Bowl will be played in San Francisco on February 7. So you would think that it would be very easy for the Franklin Planner people in conjunction with the sports authorities at ESPN to get the dates for the Super Bowl right.
When I put the filler pages for January of 2000 into my planner, I started to update my schedule. Since I was getting familiar with this new planner, I paid close attention to any of the new features. As I thumbed through the pages, I saw they had included the Super Bowl on January 31. As I looked at it longer, I thought “Wow! The Super Bowl has never been on a Monday before!” Again, I assumed that the ESPN Franklin Planner pages would know when the Super Bowl was being played. As time got closer to the game, I saw stories about the game on the news. When I heard them talk about Super Bowl Sunday, I assumed that the reporters had gotten it wrong or I misunderstood them. The ESPN Franklin Planner pages couldn’t be wrong. It was the middle of the week before I realized that the ESPN Franklin Planner pages were wrong and the Super Bowl would be played on Super Bowl Sunday just like every other year. The ESPN Franklin Planner page also said the game would be played in Atlanta, Georgia. What if they got that wrong too?
