LEHI — What began as friendly banter has hardened into a full diplomatic freeze at a Point of the Mountain tech office, where Utah and BYU fans have now gone nine consecutive workdays without speaking to one another ahead of the November 7 Holy War, employees confirmed.
The two camps currently communicate exclusively through shared documents and calendar invites. A meeting titled “Sync??” has been declined and re-sent fourteen times. Someone has changed the office Wi-Fi password and is, per sources, “waiting to see who asks.” The break room television has been permanently set to a weather radar of another state.
“It isn’t hostility. It’s strategy,” said one Utah fan, who has begun cc’ing the BYU fans on emails they were already on, a gesture analysts describe as “the corporate equivalent of planting a flag.” A BYU fan across the pod responded by printing a single page — just the all-time series record — and leaving it on the shared printer, face down, where it remains as a kind of unexploded ordnance.
Management has declined to intervene, citing last year’s incident, in which an HR-facilitated “rivalry lunch” ended with both sides leaving through different doors and taking the sandwiches with them. The office’s lone neutral employee, a remote-work transplant from Ohio, has been formally designated Switzerland; he now eats lunch in his car and has asked, twice, “how long this can possibly last,” to which both sides answered, in unison, for the first time in days: “Until November 8.”
Sociologists say the cold war will end the moment the game does, at which point the losing side will discover a sudden, deep respect for “keeping it classy,” while the winning side begins a calendar year of bringing it up in entirely unrelated meetings. At press time, both factions were united in one belief: the guy from Ohio does not understand, and never will.
Photo: AlainV, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons