contract bridge
　Contract bridge is a card game in which a trump suit may be declared.
　　 　　

My father raised his children to be card counters. Not the sort you see in the movies being escorted to a private room of a casino and educated in blackjack etiquette by a sap wielding pit boss. The other sort. Kids who mentally track the number of trumps that have been played in a given round of contract bridge. No need for the threat of a broken arm and instantly being banned from the premises for life. Just as well since ‘the premises’ was normally home.

Losing a trick of bridge by being blindsided by that last hold out trump was close to unforgivable. An unforced error. A waste. So much so that Dad painted a vivid picture of the consequences with the phrase “There’s a man walking down Piccadilly with the seat out of his pants because he didn’t count trumps.” I knew that Piccadilly was in London thanks to hours staring at a Monopoly board. Pants were just another word for trousers. To this day, though, I have yet to work out what could possibly have been the chain of events that led from someone forgetting the trump count to what befell that poor man in Piccadilly. Even at the age of ten I knew that mutilating a man’s clothes was an unlikely way to recover a gambling debt. I was equally sure that this was not the bridge world’s walk of shame. Did this man even start in Piccadilly or was he dropped off there after being subjected to something? Most troubling of all was why did the man continue down Piccadilly when presumably he knew he was in a state of undress? A mystery unsolved.

To me, Dad’s seat-out-of-the-pants story was a simple lesson in playing cards, albeit a puzzling one with slightly troubling overtones. Recently, though, I noticed that I have always demanded of myself the workplace equivalent of counting trumps. It’s held me in very good stead. I tip my hat to the man in Piccadilly who has stayed patiently by my side long after I stopped playing bridge.