If you send out a whole bunch of emails telling people it’s
too late, baby, they usually respond by asking you to do something that you
have explicitly announced that it is too late to do. It has ever been thus. My
assumption is that most high school forensics coaches are also teachers. It is
remarkable, therefore, how many of them never quite got the hang of reading
comprehension.
Sigh.
I do not like the policing side of running tournaments.
Although I’m fairly capable of reaming people out, and I can out-argue all but
the very best, it is not my choice to do so. I am a quiet, contemplative sort,
happy with a good book, maybe written by Jane Austen, and a cup of tea, with
some Renaissance lute music playing gently in the background. I can work out
complex formulas in Excel until the cows come home, although there I prefer
music a little more hard-driving. I like to sit in my rocking chair and watch
the butterflies twitter from bloom to bloom, perhaps with a cold drink and a
little piano jazz in the background. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. (And yes,
there are times when I like to listen to the score of The King and I, if you caught the reference.)
But tournaments usually don’t offer comparable pleasures.
The lead up is primarily people asking you for things you don’t want to give
them, but here it breaks down into two categories: people who ask nice, and
people who don’t. I should probably add a third category: people who ask whom I
wouldn’t give the time of day to if they were standing under Big Ben while it
was chiming. I assume these people know who they are. Anyhow, the lead up is
annoying at best. Then there’s registration, the immediate prologue, for which
some people spend days polishing their excuses for, A) changing everything at
the last minute, and/or B) not having a check for the correct amount of money.
There are also people who will try to sneak in changes to save a $10 fine. Kids
who say that their chaperone is parking the car, but fail to mention that
they’re parking it in Hoboken in front of the saloon in which they intend to
spend the rest of the day watching ESPN running interviews with the families of
the Chicago Cubs starting lineup. Parents, God love ‘em, who have never done
this before and, to be honest, really aren’t doing it now either. And that old
guy who thinks I really like to hear him tell dirty jokes. Why would he think
that? I assume it’s because he thinks everybody likes to hear him tell dirty
jokes, since he doesn't know me from a hole in the wall. To be honest, it’s not a question of dirty or clean, although the former
do tend to have a certain repellence, but the intrinsic idea of telling jokes
in the first place. If I want jokes, I’ll pick up a copy of a certain magazine
that, as the VCA well knows, I have instant access to, and chortle away. Mostly
I don’t do jokes. And I would appreciate if you wouldn’t do them either. (The
one exception to this was my first poker game when I started working in
publishing. The guys in that game were encyclopedic in their joke knowledge,
and actually funny. But that was a unique situation. Remind me to tell you
about how jokes work, or at least used to work, some day when we have nothing
better to do.)
Then there’s the tournament itself, with the ebb and flow of
pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing Start, relaxing for a
while, pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing Start,
explaining to the team who stayed in the cafeteria when everyone else rushed
out en masse that, if both their phones aren’t working, the stampede to the
exits of everyone else might have provided some sort of hint that something was
happening, and they might want to have inquired of the authorities, relaxing
for a while, pairing, browbeating judges who are incapable of pressing
Start—Rinse. Repeat.
There will be rules questions. Accusations. Raised voices.
An odd glitch in tabroom that no one has ever seen before and will never see
again. The Paginator will insist that we listen to Killer Mike during the Red Sox Patriots game. I’ll try to
get a personal best on the Saturday crossword. There will be ukuleles.
It will be Rather Large Bronx. Again.
///
No comments:
Post a Comment