A man who finished last in his fantasy football league had to spend 24 hours at a Waffle House restaurant. For every waffle he ate, his sentence was reduced by an hour.
If Lee Sanderlin didn’t want to spend 15 hours in a Waffle House, with tens of thousands of people on Twitter joining him in his intestinal shame, he should have been better at fantasy football. Such is the life lesson the internet imparted on Thursday and Friday, when Mr. Sanderlin,25, tweeted along as he dutifully served his sentence for finishing last place in his fantasy football league. Under the terms of his punishment, which he said was his idea, he was to remain in a Waffle House in Brandon, Miss., for 24 hours, with every waffle he consumed removing an hour from his term. He brought the world on his journey, with Twitter users riveted by his boredom and gastrointestinal distress, wondering how many syrup-and-butter-topped waffles he’d be able to choke down. “Full of waffles but devoid of life,” he tweeted at 12:25 a.m., as he struggled with his seventh waffle about eight hours in. Look, if you don’t think a man being funny while eating a lot of waffles is news, it’s not clear what you expect from the internet. It was the kind of lighthearted, fleeting moment, the my-life-is-now-your-life invited voyeurism, that easily gets buried under the more common parts of the internet: the constant physical and spiritual threats to individual well-being, a collective aimlessness expressed largely through anger, and, for the love of God, a pandemic that has sapped the world of most of its joy for about 18 months.
