My Coworkers Browbeat Me Into Drinking James Harden’s Wine

If your workplace has Slack, you know that it is designed to make remote office communications easier and more convivial, which is all well and good as long as you don't actually use it. The wise Slack user will have the discipline to read rather than contribute, and understand that their contributions are optional at best, a work-creation scam at worst, and that the middle ground is mostly sighs and eyerolls. The truth is that anything you say on there can, will, and should be held against you, possibly by someone with the power to assign stories. A case in point is a recent conversation that led to your itinerant typist drinking James Harden's J Harden-label red wine, watching a terrible game which featured the J. Harden in question, and thinking about the NBA commissioner's first truly forceful act of the season, which was to come out against the Atlanta Hawks entering a promotional partnership with a local strip club. Let us begin at the beginning, though, which in this case is last Wednesday. One of our number found an image of a promotional flyer of James Harden holding an autograph session in suburban Cleveland (he is a Cavalier for the moment) at which the one rule was that he would only sign bottles of his wine. Why this was important to our enterprise's news gathering process is a matter between that comrade and their version of God, so we won't speculate. Since few people walk around carrying wine bottles (they normally are found sitting in a park, with the bottle in a bag), this was clearly a work designed to get people to buy his stuff. Harden had gotten into wine several years earlier as part of sizable number of players dabbling in oenology, a movement that was almost certainly inspired by longtime San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, whose affinity for the grape was devout and refined, and who would always select the wine at any dinner as long as it met three criteria—devotion to craft, taste, and a cost-per-glass equivalent to a mid-size car payment. Harden joined with an Australian company called J Shed and lent his name to three varieties: two reds and a prosecco which, like most proseccos, is kidding itself by even worming its way into a bottle. Your author knew a deeply committed Harden apologist and decided to buy a bottle of each to gift to said friend at an appropriate future date, but when that date came, said friend declined because he was "celebrating" Dry January, the sap. We were stuck with three bottles that we couldn't give away, didn't have any burning desire to open ourselves or the impetus to find another Hardenophile upon which to foist the goods.