Posted: 6:55 pm
Thu, March 18, 2010
By Liz Farmer 

They call it March Madness for a reason — and it’s not always about what happens on the basketball court.

During the first two days of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, which started Thursday, offices around the country are transformed, and otherwise normal employees can become strangely insane.

Conservative business attire is ditched for unfashionably bright team colors, pizza and other junk food replaces the well-rounded lunch, and the only conferences going on in conference rooms are during commercial breaks to discuss how everyone’s bracket predictions are faring.

The tournament can create quite a dilemma for people when normal life interferes with their alma maters’ games.

Richard Jaklitsch of the Jaklitsch Law Group in Upper Marlboro faced that problem when he and other co-workers wanted to watch the University of Maryland take on the University of North Carolina-Wilmington in the first round of the tournament. It was 2003 and they were attending an Anne Arundel Bar Association event, and he had convinced the hotel bar manager to put the game on the television.

But the manager refused to play it with sound because the hotel had hired a singer to entertain its bar crowd.