A little over two days from now, Saag Gosh!

Tonight is when I get all the data organized. There are the usual last minute problems with teams falling off the roof or needing assurances that they will be housed in the manner to which they have become accustomed, including the masseuse, the night nurse and the sommelier, and that’s always fun. Things had been going smoothly for a while, and I think I was getting sucked into the calm. So much for that. Yesterday was one damned thing after the other.

On the day itself, I use the JV patented “If You Want It Done Right” approach to registration. The thing is, I work a lot of tab rooms (who knew?) and that means I work with a lot of registration tables, and I’ve got to say this, people: most of your registration tables suck. Yeah, yours. Here’s the thing about registration. To begin with, everything nowadays is online, either with JOT or tabroom.com, which means that all the guests have entered their data to the best of their abilities. This does not mean that they’ve done it correctly; some schools don’t know their students/judges/coaches all that well, so their online registrations are sometimes more an approximation of their realities than any sort of reflection of reality. Still, this is better than the days before online registrations.

Then there’s the registration in person, at which point we ought to achieve reality. At the table, discrepancies are caught and fixed. But there’s the rub. They really aren’t.

First of all, often the attendees simply breeze over the registration paperwork, missing problems. You’ve got to make sure they really, really read it and double-check it. Secondly, any changes have to get to tab. But half the registration tables I see, run by students, don’t understand that their getting the changes themselves isn’t enough, and that they must be passed along. In a timely manner. All of them. Before the tournament is over.

On the other end, even some of the people running tournaments don’t understand the relationship between the data from registration and the data in TRPC. After the data is in TRPC, changing it on tabroom.com or JOT is rather pointless, eh? Any wonder why at some tournaments Round One is also known as Attendance? We need to train people in the one basic rule: “Listen When Menick Tells You Something.” I’ve never seen anyone fail who has been thoroughly trained in this. Seriously.

Anyhow, if you do it yourself JV style as I intend to do, you either get everything straight the first time or have no one to blame but yourself (or, I guess, JV). “Hi. Welcome to Bump. It’s so nice to see you. Have you lost weight? Give me a check. Changes? What do you mean, no changes? Look again, you schmegeggie. Aha! Okay, give me cash. Thank you. And have a magical tournament.”