If there’s one thing I’ve learned so far in Sleep and Dreams, it’s that when it comes to wasting time in lecture, Scrabulous is in. Forget relics like AIM and Drug Wars. Nowadays the cool kids are the ones with eyes glued to a virtual Scrabble board.

What happened to the good ol’ days, when lectures used to be about passing notes and whispering with the real-live person next to you? Talk about a bunch of 2.0 losers. Determined to jump on the Scrabble bandwagon without surrendering to the godless Applications trend, I decided to kick it old school, and seek out a local Scrabble group in the area.

A little online research quickly revealed that Palo Alto is home to not one but two Scrabble clubs: a Thursday group which meets on California Ave.; and a Monday one which meets at the El Camino Boston Market.

My friends Sam and Sean decided to tag along, and Sean, as the driver, quickly made the executive decision that Boston Market was the worst possible location for a Scrabble tournament. So, we headed down to California Ave. instead. Arriving at the cafe though, we found the tournament to be a bit different than expected.

While the online details for the event had described the players as a “low key, casual, friendly group,” such a collection was nowhere to be found. Instead, we saw only one middle-aged man, sitting with a box of Scrabble on his table.

Sizing up the competition, Sam and Sean wanted to back out. Claiming that they couldn’t fight my “last battle” as a columnist for me, the boys threatened to go across the street to the Nut House. Luckily, their insatiable desire for Scrabble got the best of them, and they eventually relented to come inside and play.

The man at the table was Matt, the event’s organizer and a Palo Alto high school English teacher. Excited we had showed up, Matt was eager to start playing. We drew our seven letters, and quickly got down to business.

An uneven distribution of vowels meant that most of our words ended up being pretty pathetic. Luckily this gave us plenty of time to go over the basic chit-chat: Sam and Sean are both econ majors; I like Russia; Matt didn’t know what lox and bagels were until he enrolled at Brandeis College, etc...

To be honest though, most of the conversation was rather depressing. Matt had been teaching for a while, and he was getting pretty sick of it. He graded about 3,000 pages of writing a year, and the job’s biggest consolation was the hope that his students would go on to remember him.

Sean thought this would be a good time to mention how much he hadn’t liked high school English. Sam and I tried not to hide under the table.

Later on, I asked Matt if he ever went to the Monday Boston Market Scrabble games. He said he had choir practice Mondays. And besides, he had beef with the guy who organized the event.

“I’ve met him in person,” Matt confided, “and he’s not a very nice person.”

He added: “He’s also started poaching my players.”

Apparently Matt’s Boston Market nemesis had taken to messaging players who had RSVPed to Matt’s online ad, urging them to attend his own gathering instead.

Starting to get excited, I asked if this guy was an English teacher from a rival high school.

He wasn’t.

At the end of our first game, Sam came out the victor, beating both Sean and me, as well as our fearless leader. When we declined to play another game, Matt looked disappointed. For the past few weeks, he told us, he had been getting RSVPs from people planning to come to the meetings, but usually no one showed up.

Sam, Sean and I all felt bad about leaving Matt there alone. But not as bad as when we realized we had forgotten to pay the $2-per-player fee he had stipulated in his ad.

While we had trouble figuring out on what the $2 might actually be spent, we knew one thing was for sure — a dying business like “live person-playing Scrabble” needs as many $2 as it can get.