Monday, January 30, 2012

Do-It-Yourself Registration

Things are a little odd at the DJ and I may get some time back for other things, i.e., the time I spend at home on DJing might go back to time spent NJing. We’ll see. If it turns out that way, it will probably only be for a short time, but I really want to take a look at some of my manuals, which are probably a bit out of date by now. As they’re intended for novices, the core is probably okay, but to say that LD has changed in the last few years is to say that the sun rose in the east this morning. I think I have some work to do.

We ran our first MHL under the new rules this weekend, to wit, having people take responsibility for their entries online right up to registration, which consisted of them saying they were all present and accounted for. No registration sheets to ignore. The first problem was that you can’t access your registration on tabroom.com on tournament day, so I had to tinker with the dates, but after that, people were able to get in fine. The usual complication of changing a name, requiring a switch to a non-participant, then a drop, then a switch to the real participant, is always a poser; I did a couple of those myself for people. I kept myself online with tabroom, meaning that at registration I could help people out a bit. But mostly people did what they were supposed to do. A few folks had some extra judges that showed up for later rounds, but there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as I knew it, which I did. One school had an extra judge they didn’t know about, but that judge was a hoverer, and we had to put up sandbags outside of tab to keep her from literally standing behind us as we paired. Jeesh. We finally figured out that the problem was not that we weren’t giving her rounds—if you breathe down our necks at any point in this millennium, we will put you in every round we can—but that she was never entered by her school. There are worse offenses when it comes to handling a registration. Anyhow, the new rules went quite well, and will become the way of the future.

What I couldn’t do anything about is the number of rooms we had. I had to set limits, and you’d think that I had sold the students into hard labor in the diamond mines or something. Rule number one: don’t complain that it’s the end of the world if you’ve never volunteered to host yourself. We need solutions, not conspiracy theorists. Jeesh.

One school didn’t get in because they registered for the tournament and a minute later dropped their entry; God knows why, but all this happened a couple of weeks ago. They thought I had done something to eliminate them, which is why I always activate the change log in tabroom, so that when somebody says you did something, you can point out the date and time and name of the person who actually did do it, which more often than not is them, and not at the time and date they claimed. (The usual offense on this is that someone claims shouldn’t be charged fees because they met the deadline. But they didn’t. Tabroom.com doesn’t lie. Much.) Honestly, though, the sad thing with this school was that it was a new program that was obviously tripping over its own feet; if I had had the room, I would have let them in. Alas, we had a lack. What can you do?

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