In which we begin to debrief the Quakers

“There will be no sympathetic vomiting in the tab room.”

“Some day that woman will be judged by God! Until then, she’s judging PF.”

Those were two of my favorite quotes from this weekend’s Quaker tab room which, for a while, I doubted I would be sitting in.

Friday morning we awoke to roughly a million feet of new snow. I was certainly snowed in, school was closed for the second day in a row right before their winter break, and there was no internet service. Yikes. The phone was okay, though. I spent the morning trying unsuccessfully to scare up the bus people and the Sailors, succeeding not at all with the former and only partially with the latter. Not that I thought there was a snowball’s chance in hell that the bus would run, but with a second bus scheduled for pickup on Sunday, one wanted confirmation. I never did get it, but not seeing a bus on Sunday was, I guess, confirmation enough. I entertained the idea for a while that we might just drive down to Philadelphia in a couple of cars, but without getting any communications from a third of the Speecho-Americans, including the judge, that wasn’t happening. Meanwhile I was in communication with Kaz who was going through roughly the same confusion, with a similar amount of new snow. For all practical purposes it was clear that everyone had cancelled everything, so she and I made the call together at noon that our trips were off. Of course, we didn’t want to leave the Quakers in the lurch, and the two of us not being there would have been one hell of a lurch if I do say so myself, so we braved the elements and drove down together. To tell you the truth, aside from the thirteen hours of trying to find one another in my local train station parking lot, the trip wasn’t bad at all. I’ve got a new route in that avoids the downtown traffic, plus when we did almost arrive but couldn’t get off 76, Kaz just pulled out her phone and GPSed us in the right direction. Rule Number One for Driving: Always have a navigator with GPS capability. Rule Number Two for Driving: Try to avoid Philadelphia at all costs because the way the roads there are designed, there is no question that it is trying to avoid you.

The hit to the tournament from the weather could have been worse. It was the New Yorkers that mostly couldn’t make it; locals and long-distancers were either ahead of or behind the storm. PF, for instance, went off virtually at the cap of 100. We also had every other event under the sun, with Kaz and I doing PF, Policy, and Novice and Varsity LD. The latter of these was with both MJP and e-balloting. It was a rather small pool that I broke into 4 tiers of 7 plus a few strikes, and it worked fine, by my definition of fine. I was pleasantly surprised that the e-balloting also worked, because I’ve been wary of doing it at college tournaments with their far-flung venues, but probably an event like LD, judged almost completely by experienced judges, is the best one to do it with. In other words, CP was right. I tried to extend it to Novice LD, but few of these judges understood the concept or were plugged in, and those who were plugged in claimed ignorance, lack of computing ability, or general malaise, and we eventually had to unplug them. I didn’t even think to try it in PF, with all those goobers in the pool.

Best PF story: A team debates for a little bit of the round, gets sick and says they’re going to forfeit. They abandon the field of battle. The judge, claiming that there is no way the other side of this resolution could ever win a round, period, refuses to accept their forfeit and gives them the win. Needless to say, this resulted in two double byes. The first double bye went to the teams upon whom this judge was inflicted, and the second double bye went to that judge, to whom we said bye-bye as we marked him as inactive. Good grief.

We had a few tabroom glitches, but nothing major as we get more used to the program. The only real hassle was that, since it was running three ginormous tournaments at once, occasionally we would wait for minutes at a time for access. Inevitably this was when we would be wanting faster than instantaneous connections, but that’s most of the time anyhow. The system didn’t break, but there’s no question that it was pretty damned stretched. My guess is that this can be fixed on the back end by distributing the processing even further across the servers CP is using; this is the sort of thing of which he is a master, and since he was in one of those tab rooms, he no doubt felt our pain along with us. (And it wasn’t a local server issue, since some of us were on the Quaker network and some of us were on the Kaz network, and both hung together, so to speak.)

More tomorrow.