Monday, December 20, 2010

Whining? Moi? C'est impossible!

Never answer the phone at eight o’clock in the morning on your way to a debate tournament. It could be Kaz telling you that she may not be there to help tab. It is better to let it ring, and ring, and ring. It’s better not to know.

The story is that her bus didn’t show up, despite having been confirmed earlier in the week. There was no way she could get them down to Manhattan before around noon, so, being the pro that she is, she just came down herself by train. As it turned out, she arrived at around ten or so, and I handed off policy to her at that point.

But…oy. One person registering everybody is a nightmare. We’ve got most people trained pretty well that drops only will be accepted, but there are some teams that haven’t gotten that message, and other teams that haven’t gotten other messages entirely. My favorite conversation: “I’m a judge. I’m here to check in.” “Check in with your coach.” “We have a coach?” Yes, there is at least one team that has what can be considered a phantom coach at best. No one from the team was assigned to handle registration. And the parents who are judging (untrained, of course) don’t even know if a coach exists. Wonderful. And, of course, there’s the school that shows up with a list of who’s debating that is completely different from the one entered a mere 36 hours ago online. As I say, I’m one person registering everybody, hoping to start things by ten o’clock to provide four good rounds. Do you think that I have time to do your registration over from scratch? And finally there’s the team that didn’t show up at all, giving us no indication that they were blowing us off. Lovely.

Fortunately, I’m a magician, and I had the rounds started on time and the tournament over on time. Kaz ended up having the biggest nightmares, what with rejuggling because of that blow-off team not showing up, and the lack of her own team throwing things off balance. But she managed to perform the magic on her end as well, and pulled it off. Dunay was in tab, thank goodness, reading the ballots. Just try to do PF by yourself, what with all the switcheroos of who’s on which side when. Those ballots need careful handling. Once or twice we resorted to cards to avoid quadruple pull-ups (and also to impress Dunay that we knew how to do cards, but he seemed blasé about the whole deal). We were so busy that I never even broke out the music, also I did manage to squeeze in the crossword puzzle. I couldn’t engage Dunay in a duel for $20 on it, for some reason, but this was probably prudent on his part.

Ain’t debate great?

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