Jake, Part 1

The world’s longest weekend is over.

From a tabbing perspective, the event starts when people start sending you their strikes and rankings. Getting and applying them all is one of those boring jobs that you are bound to screw up, but this year I did pretty well. Lost one or two out of dozens and dozens, and those probably because when you enter them sometimes when you hit the button they don’t take, and you just don’t see what isn’t there. (Apply theory argument accordingly.) So by Thursday night I had the data uploaded and all the rankings entered, plus a spreadsheet of all the strikes, so I felt pretty much on top of things when I tucked myself in on Big Jake Eve.

I arrived with Sailors in tow around one o’clock on Friday. This was seriously early, but there were still strikes to enter and the general hoo-ha of registration changes to input, and it couldn’t have been all that early because my fellow wizards on Pfffft and Policy were already in place. As usual, we were in the cornerest corner of the library, off to ourselves wishing we had wifi. I promoted a young Jacobite to read the strikes to me, a much better system than me reading them and inputting them alone. Unfortunately, I found probably the only Jacobite on the Bronx team who could mangle not one, not two, but literally every team name. It was a marvel to behold. I mean, she was so good I want to put her in charge of award ceremonies from now on. I always feel bad when I mangle some pronunciation of a particularly unusual name, but the ability to mangle all of them provides an equal playing field—a sense of justness, if you will—that removes some of the agony. And, in addition, it heightens the suspense. Did she announce my name? Did I come in third? Or was that someone else? You’re not used to this when your name is Smith. It’s high time we put the pluribus back into unum.

While this was going on, changes from the table were occasionally sent to us on little scraps of torn paper, and Kaz arrived, although she was not on a little scrap of torn paper, and we whittled away at the entries, continually asking the Jacobites who were running us this information if it were indeed all there was, as it was scanty to the max, as the Valley Girl said of the underwear. Yes, yes, came the reply, that’s all there is, there ain’t no more, everyone’s here and registered, so we printed up a list of teams. All the judges were in place. Everything was ready to go. Except for Big Jake, the building, that is.

Jake usually runs on the Jake weekend for a reason, to wit, the following weekend (and this year’s Jake weekend) is when they have parent-teacher conferences. These are conducted in the classrooms until about 4:00 or so, which meant not only did we not have access to rooms, we also did not have access to O’C, who instead of holing up in the legendary Jake Fortress of Solitude, which is his usual habit of disappearance, was out there telling parents that little Johnny Smith is just a joy to coach, except of course among the Jacobites there are no literal little Johnny Smiths, which makes the Mangle Jacobite’s mispronunciations all that much more bewildering. Every Tom, Dick and Harry at Big Bronx is named Saboor, Taarini (and no, that’s not how you pronounce it) or Matt. Lots of Matts, actually. In any case, we had no O’C, through no fault of his own, and, of course, the first of the weekend’s 39 award ceremonies was scheduled to kick off the tournament, so the sun had set over the Alaskan Putin-Thinks-We’re-Normandy-Beach Mountains before we actually got started. Kaz and I had ballots and schematics at the ready, so we sat at the table on stage like people too cheap to buy orchestra seats and enjoyed some speeches as some deserving folks received their Bronx Bummer Awards (which doesn’t sound quite right, and since I’m one of the few possessors of two of them, given that the first casting of the trophy looked like an Albert Spier special and O’C replaced it the following year with the Mighty Bronx Obelisk, you’d think I’d know better, but you know that’s not going to happen in either of our lifetimes). It was especially fun to see Nadir again, whom I judged about a billion times back in the day and pretty much had to pick up every time except for once that I recall, although I’m sure he only remembers that once. Anyhow, at this point Putin and the Red Army were storming Juneau and we gave out the schematics and the ballots. This is the moment known at many tournaments as the taking of attendance. But most of the judges were there, and we only had to push one or two ballots, so we were in pretty good shape.

Except for two things. Our LD room list and the policy room list had not been separated at birth, which meant double-booking. And some of the debaters we were told were there were not there. So, we figured out which teams were no-shows and made up some new rooms and printed another list of everyone at the tournament, which was slightly smaller than the previous list. Then we were told that the principal didn’t want anyone to pee in the rooms, which, while logical, seemed especially paranoid if not downright bizarre, but then it turned out that we couldn’t use the rooms with pee in them, which wasn’t much of an improvement over the original request, until Gazzola Joe explained that we couldn’t use rooms with the letter P in them. This, finally, made sense. Meanwhile, we found that there were some other additional debaters not there, and we again deleted teams and printed up a complete and final list of contestants. In all, we printed up 295 complete and final lists of contestants, no two alike. At one point it was looking as if, rather than running a tournament, we would just keep figuring out who was really there until we were down to one, and that one would be the winner. In the end, we did have, roughly, 140 LDers. The problem, it turns out, was that the person who was receiving the registrations at the table to pass them along to us was more of a collector than a passer, and apparently this particular Jacobite is still holding on them, since we never did see them.

When all was said and done, thanks to the 5:00 starting time, which was totally out of anyone’s control because of the parent-teacher conferences, aside from Award Ceremony I—everything at Jake is roman, including the numerals, which meant that people had to enter speaker points like XXVIII which can get very confusing in the tab room—there was really no way we could have a civilized third round that night. So Kaz and I convinced O’C to bag it after two and we promised we’d make it up the next day with single flights. At which point I popped back onto the bus with the Sailors and headed home on the earliest night ever for a Jake Day One.

And so to bed. And more to come.