Putting it together

You know, we all could go to the Sondheim event in NYC this weekend, and blow off Districts altogether. Oh, the temptation.

Putting together Districts, with all of about 10 schools, is about a billion times harder than putting together a normal tournament with 50 schools. In a normal tournament, people send you names, which you copy from their email and paste into your tournament software, and then on the day of the tournament, you compare the names you have with the names of the people they actually brought, and true the two up. Sure, there are always issues, like the English Language Exam I'll be giving to judges next year at Bump, and there's housing and feeding and whatnot, but you do it every year and get better at it every year, and there you are. But with Districts, everything is out of your hands. Your roster of attending schools is proscribed, comprising those institutions that want to go to Finals in whatever godforsaken wilderness has taken the bit this particular year. There's degree points and fees to be sorted out, and every couple of days Ripon sends an update, much like the grupenfuhrers bidding down to the poor functionarities at the front with order after order, any one of which obeyed incorrectly could result in disaster that could bring the world of forensics to a crashing halt. Forms fly faster than even Plato could have imagined; they must all be signed correctly, filled in correctly, typed (although no one does), never photocopied or faxed (dream on, Wisconsin). All this paperwork arrives on my desk, and I sort it out onto little index cards covered with my basement mold until the numbers add up correctly. (This does, at least, remove some mold from the basement, which is one positive benefit.) Every year Ripon sends me enough supplies for a three-year mission to Mars, and I've been doing this for 4 or 5 years, so you can do the math. Double entries, which are rife, must be marked and asterisked. No one ever tells you who's judging, so you put down what little information they do supply, and then in the bustle of registration you try to get the rest, and then about 11:00 on Saturday they come and complain that some judge you didn't know existed hasn't adjudicated any rounds yet.

Of course, since we have no rooms to hold the event, I shouldn't worry. We'll do speech at Stephen's and debate at Ewok's.

My biggest worry, of course, is putting a lid on the media. O'Cruz will be there, a neutral judge with camera and pith helmet, reporting back every flip of the cards in the tab room. The eyes of the world will be upon us!