Monday, March 14, 2016

In which we consider the Catholics

Yet again things heat up at the DJ. When this happens, everything else suffers. It’s a good thing they pay the bills, or I wouldn’t put up with it. Then again, one does enjoy being used to the fullest extent. The alternative is to dry up and blow away, or to play golf, both of which are equally bleak prospects for most people. (I know. I used to play golf. I hated it 80% of the time, which is a bad percentage. Now I just watch my bag of clubs collecting dust while I’m on the treadmill in the mornings. It is as good a use for them as my swinging them around blindly on our local golf courses.)

Saturday was our local qualifier for CatNats. Kaz always joins us for this, even if it means driving down from Lexwegia. The attraction is twofold. First, there’s the fun of doing this unique tournament, and second, there’s lunch down in lower Manhattan. So it’s myself, JV and Sheryl, and we have at it in what is, for me and (I think) JV, the last tabbing of the season, and close to it for SK. It’s nice that our valediction is a pleasant one.

CFL has all sorts of rules, and we adhere to them as best we can. Schools should not hit other schools too much, sides are sacred and assigned in PF as well as LD (but would be the first thing to go if we had to do it), judges go in 2 to a round, single-flighted for all but the tab lunch third round, and can judge the same people on the opposite side, but we try to keep this from happening in the presets. JV worked out a nice matrix for this which, sadly, was kiboshed by a desire for tabroom to put people on the sides it wanted to put them on unless you pressed the right button, which we discovered too late. I vaguely remember seeing this button in the past. I’m hoping that my recent reacquaintance with it will bode better for the future. We got ourselves into a little mischief because of this, but nothing horrible, except for JV’s disappointment that he had to rewrite his matrix. The best laid plans…

We do the pairings on cards, then enter the pairings and throw in the judges on the computer. Lots of reading out who judged whom and did they pick them up and all that sort of thing. So despite the small size of the event, there’s a lot of work, and given that the results are meaningful—entry into a big national finals—it’s important to get it right. This year we added an extra audit, so that rightness was better assured. As far as we know, right it was. Curiously, of 14 entries in LD, 8 girls and 6 boys, the first 8 slots in order were all girls and the next 6 were not. The judge pool was relatively evenly split genderwise. Which says to me that, at least around here, we’ve got an awful lot of people who don’t buy into the idea that girls can’t do well in this event, and an awful lot of good girl debaters. Congrats to the qualifiers.


While all of this was going on, we were conducting a text conversation with CP who claims that, despite my protestations to the contrary last week, tabroom fairly distributes PF judges so that everyone gets rounds (with some preference to hireds and schools with larger teams, the latter being irrelevant at the Gem). Since we hand-placed all the judges in round 5 because so many had not been used even once all weekend, we were able to point to that round when he said we were filled with bologna on white bread. Bologna on white bread yourself, bub! I mean, if it were just me saying it, he wouldn’t believe me. When Kaz also says it? And it’s clear as day on the schematic? Well, in that case it’s obviously user error, it’s just that it takes him longer to find a user error that might apply. This is why, when I ran a systems department back in the day, I wouldn’t let the tech people talk to the users. Too many fist fights broke out. How could they not?

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