In addition to the intense nuttiness on the part of the
attendees at the Land o’ Lakes, good old tabroom definitely wasn’t feeling up
to snuff, so there was also intense nuttiness on the operational side. Brian M
claimed that it was a result of carrying over an old tournament. Maybe, but
poltergeists seem more likely, if you ask me.
Rooms came and went. There were clearly pools assigned, but
when asked to use the rooms in those pools, tabroom became snooty and only used some of
them. Easy fix, but annoying.
Brackets were meant to be broken, apparently. A couple of
divisions required repairing, for no apparent reason, and more often than once.
Judges disappeared from their pools, although that one
definitely was a result of the old-tournament carryover, because they were scheduled to be
somewhere, out there, not here. (Here we paint screens, if you’re of the
Sondheim persuasion.) Brian plugged that leak up.
One team disappeared entirely somewhere during breaks. This
was the biggest poser. Certainly no one in tab took them out. They had broken
into elims, and I was pairing a round subsequent to one that looked done when
somebody pointed out that the preceding round wasn’t done, and that we were still waiting for results. Lo and behold, there was
a hole where the name of one of the teams should be. We sent, first, our NSDA
rep, Deano, up to investigate. He disappeared into the L o’ L vortex, and wasn’t
heard from ever again. We sent an army of Lakewegians up to investigate after a
while, and they too disappeared into the L o’ L vortex. Those of us in tab were
too scared to go ourselves, fearing that we too would never be heard from
again, so we sent for the team that hadn’t disappeared from tabroom and, eventually, managed
to find the team that had
disappeared. There was no reason that we could discover that they had been
apparated from the tournament, which is extremely difficult magic, as we all
knew. We were sure we hadn’t done it, and we thought maybe that the school had
done it themselves, but then again, they couldn’t drop a team after a
tournament closed registration, so, well, there you are. A mystery wrapped in
an enigma on rye with extra mayonnaise. One of the missing teamsters had even
won, and picked up, a speaker award right before the puff of smoke that took
her away. We recreated their school and put them back in, which was easy
enough, but, as I say, go figure. We couldn’t. And still can’t.
Given the small number of schools, and the tendency of
schools to dominate one area of the brackets—that is, all of X school is 3-0,
all of Y school is 0-3—we had to do some fancy dancing to keep the
bracket-breaking sane. I did one round entirely on the fly while Kaz and Brian
were solving some other impenetrable problem, and was rather pleased with
myself. CP swears that he has a better way of pairing that he will put in
eventually, but then again, Nixon had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War.
Whatever.
I am trusting that none of the above problems arise this
week at the Gem Revival. I mean, it was— Well, if I said it once to Sheryl, I
said it a hundred times:
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