Tuesday, February 22, 2011

Notes from the City of Bro' Lovin'

The Philadelphia experience was excellent.

It started at the tournament hotel, where we were met with a level of welcome packetage beyond all previous experience. Aside from their actually getting all the reservations correct (mine was a bit screwy, with late addition and subtraction), they had a manila envelope for each room, in which were tournament info sheets, maps, trolley schedules and very specific instructions for using the trolley (“Go out front, turn left,” that sort of thing), not to mention a little packet of 16 tokens. According to the Quakers (that’s the Penn mascot, congruent with Ben F as the mascot for everything else in Philadelphia including the cheese steaks, the cream cheese, the mall, the dog walk, the water treatment plant, the drug dealers and the sports franchises), this was mostly done by the hotel, the Crowne Plaza on Market Street. Simply put, I want to have their baby.

I popped over to the school, a short ride away, and checked in, finding CP and, shortly thereafter, Kaz. We had a nice dinner and when I got back to my room I uploaded the tournament and was all ready to go. That Friday was the warm one, and the streets of Philadelphia were thronged with warm Pennsylvanians, which are apparently an unpredictable enough group that stores were shutting down out of fear of their eruption. None of this was around us, however, and only Kaz had encountered it as she drove about in her car obediently doing whatever her GPS told her. At some point it told her to trap me in the back seat, and I almost ended up spending the night in the valet parking before it was decided to set me free. I cannot explain this, and will not try. I will point out that not only was I held prisoner, but at some point CP held us up as he did some sort of random posting, costing us at least three precious minutes of my life which I will never get back, which is a lot more than it sounds when you add in all the complaining I did to CP about the three precious minutes of my life that I would never get back. Figure an hour or two, give or take. Still, I manfully went on, managed to get a good night sleep, and was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed in the morning.

Somewhere along the way we acquired a couple of Bronx Scientologists who were bunking with us for the weekend, and they and my novice and Kaz headed out Saturday a.m. on a blustery morning quite different from the preceding one. Not much you can do about that. The underground trolley got us where we were going, and we got down to business. There was some confusion about scheduling, in that I thought we were starting at nine (silly me, I had looked at the posted schedule) and CP thought we were starting at eight (silly CP, he had posted some other schedule somewhere else), but we got everything up before nine, and got accelerated as the day progressed, and we ended the 6 rounds of PF by nine o’clock thanks to a couple of single-flighted rounds, so no one was complaining about that. No one complained either about the digs for central HQ, given that it’s all comfy chairs with a superior and healthy food court in the basement.

The biggest problem, endemic to colleges it seems, was the loosey-goosey participation of the parli people in the judge pool. They’re good for PF, but their names changed with a regularity that was mind-boggling. The outset of every round was marked by a totally new slate of adjudicators. We didn’t have this problem in LD, where you really need people who know the activity, but we certainly did have it in PF and Speech. The Quakers have been apprised of the undesirability of this business, and will work it out with their parli partners for next year. I somehow managed to keep a relatively cool head for this, although I did lose it in the morning when coaches didn’t show up to judge the first break round. This is just not acceptable. There is an obligation that we all share, and when I’m there at the crack of dawn trying to get the round out and you’re home in bed eating madeleines and sipping jasmine tea, we are not going to have what you would call a meeting of the minds. Simply put, don’t do this if you expect me to treat you with professional courtesy, because you have forfeited your professional credentials. Genuine issues that arise are one thing, and often there are reasonable excuses, but absent that, it’s a no-brainer. Be there. Do your job. Fulfill your responsibilities. End of story.

But these were minor blips. Otherwise, the tournament ran as smooth as a goat, and we watched with glee as our cousins to the northeast lugged their way through turtledom while we rabbited to the finish line. If you were there instead of with us, I hope you can satisfactorily answer the question that this was a wiser choice for your team than joining us at a well-run and shorter event where all the profits go to support inner city debate. We’ll be back at the old stand again next year this time. I hope to see you there.

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