You're the frog, I'm the peach

I don’t want to be too hard on O’C, really. He’s the kind of person you want supporting your tournament. He beats the drum at WTF, and he does what he can to hire good judges. These are both important. Lakeland vis-à-vis LD is like Hen Hud vis-à-vis Policy: it’s a foreign language, and all its practitioners are aliens. If a school has no entrée into a particular activity, it’s fairly impossible to make inroads in that activity, and very difficult to conduct a tournament around it. I did Policy for years before finally giving up, for many reasons (which I’ve gone into at length here); chief among these, and perhaps underlying most of them, was the alien-ness of that activity. I just didn’t know the players, much less what they were playing, and vice versa. Not a good fit. Anyhow, O'C bridges the gap between normal people and aliens at tournaments like Lakeland, and that is a very important function.

(One thing I don't understand: where is New York City at a tournament like Lakeland? No Manhattan schools? At an invitational less than an hour away, with housing? Maybe the fact that it has no TOC bid for LD made them feel as if it wasn't worth the bother. Not very neighborly of them. Sigh...)

Anyhow, O’C did get a good enrollment at the tournament, absent Manhattan, and a pretty good judge pool. Unfortunately, that pool was stretched to breaking. Given the size of the field, and an absolute exact amount of judge coverage (with maybe just the tinest overage), things were going to have to be done manually to make things work. And here’s where he and I had a little falling out (and he’s more than capable of responding here, if he wishes, so it’s not like I’m taking pot shots at a sitting target); he likes to do everything very swiftly and show you the results but you don’t really feel like you’re a part of it. In other words, he likes tabbing alone, even when he’s not. (Curiously enough, this reminds me of Soddie, who was quite the solo maestro in his day; maybe it's a Bronx thing.) Students of this blog know my feelings about solo blogging. That, to me, is like do-it-yourself dentistry. It can turn out well, provided everything is fine already and no major work needs to be done. But once the drill starts grinding, you don’t want the hand and the mouth to belong to the same person. All my tab errors over the years have been based on either having to work alone or not double-checking; I now do my best to avoid those problems, even if it means hijacking some poor Sailor to work with me because all the usual suspects are judging rounds in Timbuktu that weekend. It’s just the best way I know how to do it. And when things are even slightly askew—or a lot askew—it's the only way. Scarsdale is a good case in point, where there were three of us, and possibly the most complicated arrangement of judges possible (get judged in flight A, be a judge in flight B, don’t overwork people, assign rankings, mix and match single and double flights), and we did it pretty well because we all did it together. One person takes something from column A, the other takes something from column B, and we make it happen as a team. Tabbage a trois…

Trust me on this.

Anyhow, there were dicey moments beyond just the one entry error (which was pretty regrettable, given that it was actually my lone, lorn ballot that got manhandled: if you're only going to judge once every blue moon, you'd like them to get the decision straight). The TRPC instructions actually call for someone looking over your shoulder when you do entry, a spotter, in other words: excellent advice. But this one entry glitsch wasn't the whole of it. There were also schematics going out differently than the printed ballots and other niceties that were, in fact, not errors on the part of tab but software blips. Mark my words, Grasshopper: tabbing a tournament is a bundle of surprises, not necessarily of your own making, and despite the fact that I do it almost every week, I have yet to feel that I've seen everything. So another rule is stay by the tab table until all ballots are successfully picked up. Getting a round printed up does not mean that it is happening. I complain to O'C about this all the time: he wanders off too much. In fact, he is the King of the Wanderers Off (or the King of the Wander Offers). Admittedly, I don’t wander enough. We need to come together somewhere in the middle. For that matter, we had both wandered off (for a quick dinner across the street) when I got a call explaining how one school's teams had simply evanesced in the middle of a round, causing their chaperone judge to spontaneously evanesce himself (I'm not quite sure why he had to join them in disappearing, to tell you the truth, since he was not their transportation), leaving behind an unjudged round. This was the one I ended up judging the next day (a very simple solution) since it was too late to do anything about it when we heard about it. I got the impression from the call at the time that people were "trying to solve the problem" which of course brought from me the advice, tell them to move away from the computer—NOW—and we'll fix it when we get back. The LAST thing you want is some piker who knows nothing about anything solving problems for you. That is how you generate more problems. Look back at my domino analysis from yesterday. And in fact this whole thing did generate yet further problems the next day because despite telling the software not to pair these evanesced debaters, it continued to do so but, remarkably, it wasn't reporting that it was doing so. (I can't explain this any better, but I assure you, it was amusing in a crying through tears kind of way.)

Anyhow, O’C and I are, in fact, in agreement on our future operations. Team only. No Picard and Riker. No first chair, second chair. We will be Castor and Pollux. Frick and Frack. Tyler and Tanner. Peanut butter and jelly. Moules et frites. A frog and a peach. When I was talking about Regionals yesterday and my own screw up, admittedly it wouldn’t have happened if I had had a team on it, so there’s plenty of hubris to go around here. And so O'C and I go off into the sunset, and "Happy Trails" plays in the background, and earthling and alien live happily ever after.

Don’t you love a story with a happy ending?