Monday, January 06, 2014

Newark in a day - a traveler's guide

There’s nothing quite so bracing as two days of debating squeezed into one. But at least we had the one, which is way better than none.

There was a lot of run-up activity for Newark, not least of which was the cancelled round robin. As it turns out, using the tabroom.com software requires an awful lot of it is run-up, period. There’s more buttons to press and things to set up than sending a rocket to Mars. And if any of it isn’t right, all hell breaks loose. By now I’m pretty good at setting things up myself (although CP probably wouldn’t agree), but most tournaments do their own setups and I just jump in while the rocket is on the launching pad. I would have done it this way, but they did it that way, and, well, there you are. So it goes. Anyhow, tabbing, whatever the software, is ninety percent solving problems in situ, so that’s what you do. If everything ran perfectly and all debaters and judges were angels, we wouldn’t need tab staff.

One of the mires of tabroom is, when there are lots of activities—and Newark had two each of PF and LD, a full suite of speech and congress, plus policy and an RR (the only things that didn’t happen)—there are so many scheduling slots that the average person looking at it just wants it all to go away. When you’ve set it up for three days including RR and compress it down to one day, there are even more scheduling slots. Eventually I had it set up to make sense, and one has to do this because you can’t just fudge it, but it only made sense to me, so it was a good thing that I didn’t keel over in the middle of the tournament, because in addition to all the disruption of shipping me to the morgue, they would have had to untangle the schedule.

And we were using e-ballots, the setup for which, for the average judge, means you go to tabroom and click a button and maybe type in your phone number, but for the less than average judge it means coming to tab early and often and carping about life in general, technology in more specific terms, and then every round as it happens in even more granular terms, until when you see one of these people coming, you want to head for the hills, and they do keep coming. If you can get neither e-balloting nor old-fashioned paper balloting right, you’re sort of hopeless, but no, it’s not your fault so why don’t you talk to Mr. Cruz here, who’s half comatose from jet lag and is spending most of the day entering rogue NFL points. He’s the man to solve all your problems with a smile, and he’s the only one in the tab room who can do it while simultaneously texting—but we won't go there.

On the other hand, e-balloting does work very well for most people, and by the end of the day, everyone was either plugged in or pulled out of rounds in favor of people who were plugged in. The time savings is enormous, and if you have to keep a tournament moving, the hapless are the first to get jettisoned.

Speaking of hapless, there is apparently some Thai restaurant delivery guy still knocking on random doors throughout Newark two days later, texting O’C messages that this is an apartment, not a school, but that’s a subject for another day entirely.

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