I shoulda stood in bed

There is no more textbook version of a chain reaction than one initiated by an act of stupidity. One person puts the old noodle into idle (if, indeed, there is an idle option on the noodle in question—often people whose brains are slow to inoperative have no gear options to speak of, and therefore idling is the only possibility, and therefore no option at all) and commits an action of sheer incomprehensibility. What happens next? People affected by this action all start to tumble, one by one, with Rockette-like precision. A half hour later, the tab room staff (i.e., me) stalks out to make something happen—you know, a round, maybe, or something like that—and rather than a sea of waiting faces, there’s a pile of tumbled dominos scattered across the cafeteria.

This, in a word, is how NY Regionals was run on Saturday.

Details (i.e., names) will not be forthcoming, although those who remained in the tab room heard my plaintive screams on returning from witnessing the Debacle of the Inert Eventers, or DIE as I like to call/wish it. When all was said and done, however, we had quite a showing, and managed to qualify a rather large number of souls for the dreaded NY State Finals, but when I emerged triumphant from tab at the end of the day to make the announcements, having managed to salvage the tournament after all, grasping survival from the jaws of inertia, there weren’t even that many people left to hear about it. The Schools Who Run—that category of participants that you never see all year, that screws up everything, then disappears before its over—were in full attendance. Unless you were looking for them. There weren’t even enough little trophies to go around. When I first looked, there were 8 of them, proud albeit diminutive Nikes, but when it came time to divvy them up, there were 6 of them, proud and rather even more diminutive Nikes. One school with three qualifiers got to split two trophies (just cut both of them into thirds and throw them into a bag and everyone takes two) and one was a School Who Ran, so there you are. Or there you were. Or there you weren’t. You get the picture.

My goal had been to somehow allow people attending the Lakeland Invitational who were so inclined to also participate in simultaneous Regionals, thus making a larger field and more qualifiers, which we did, but the down side of this was a weather delay that had not been in our original estimates, not to mention a simple general-confusion factor. I won’t try it again. Even if things had been on time, it would have been just too much of a hassle. If you want to go to Regionals, go to Regionals. If you want to go to Lakeland, go to Lakeland, and never the tab twain shall meet. Because we do intend to use Lakeland for the event again next year; that part of it worked out fine. It was just the mix and match that was a problem. And, of course, the random acts of stupidity that marked the event. I wasn’t immune myself. Since I was pairing by cards, I managed with a couple of people to whom I gave an early start to forget that I had given them an early start, so I asked them to have the same round twice. They did carefully advise me that this might not be the best use of their forensic skill set, so I knew early on that we were in trouble. But re-pairing the same round may be regarded as misfortune; screwing up an entire pairing is carelessness beyond my imagining.

And then there was the invitational. (And I see O’C on tenterhooks, waiting for tomorrow’s installment…)