The Customer is Always Wrong

I hate putting together my own tournament, but I love watching other people put together theirs. At the moment I’m in various stages of involvement with various events. I’m tabbing for O’C starting tomorrow. (It's a unique tournament: The awards ceremony begins Friday afternoon and ends around lunchtime on Sunday. Then there’s a single round of debate—the round is named after Japhod Beeblebrox, a Bronx Science alum, and is called the Davy Crockett—and everyone goes home.) So there’s that one. There’s the Tiggers, registration for which opens Saturday, in which I am acting in loco palmeris to help them with general coordination. Then there’s the MHL first-timers’ next weekend, followed by a bunch o’ single days, followed by Bump.


And here’s the thing: people are really a pain in the butt.


There’s the inevitable people who, rather than signing up for a tournament, reinvent the tournament. As CP roughly puts it, you know your tournament has arrived when somebody does this. I personally deleted three requests on tabroom.com to create the New York City Invitational, and there were more than that deleted by other folks. I’ve already deleted one for Princeton. You know, sometimes you really do have to RTFM. There is a big difference between registering for a tournament and creating a tournament. Jeesh.


Then there’s invitations. While tournaments operate to some extent under common law systems of obligation and procedure, each individual tournament has its quirks. All happy tournaments are alike; each unhappy tournament is unhappy in its own way, in other words. (Are we literary today or what?) The problem is, no one ever reads the invitation. RTFI? Tournaments have rules about signing up, payments, fines and the like. I’ve simplied it at Bump so that registration closes and you pay me the money, and if you screw up you put more money into the contribution box and we send it to someplace where life is a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death, using the respectability of charitable contribution to add to the shame of people screwing up. The thing is, when people screw up, they inevitably claim they didn't. I mean, they swear to God, the furies and Dick Cheney that they’re right and you’re wrong. Hence my poorbox. It’s hard to argue in the face of all those starving suckers.


I do hate to argue with people though. I am, shockingly, rather mellow most of the time. I do need to be pushed. But people have, on occasion, pushed me. I am especially ired by bad judges, which tend to always come from the same schools, and I have begun taking action beyond bloviation. This action is usually met with stunned demurrals or slinking into the sunset mutterings about that @*&$^% Menick without actually confronting me because, well, the customer is always wrong. When you’ve entered non-English speaking judges that you haven’t trained into a tournament, it’s not easy for them to tell me that they in fact do speak English and are trained when they can only do so in a pig latin gumbo of Prakrit and Esperanto**. Jeesh, as I am wont to say.


I can’t wait to see what arises at Big Jake. Mostly it tends to run well on the customer side because people have traveled a long way and spent a lot of money and tend to be professional debate programs, as compared to pikers and stumblers and ne’er-do-wells. And besides, Ryan Hamilton, the tournament's official greeter, enforcer, bouncer and Sporcle referee, will whip people into shape if they don’t watch their step. There are a lot of things that strike fear into the hearts of debate people, e.g, the wrath of JV. But nothing can hold a candle to the threat of exile to Hamiltonia. Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair!***




* I’ve been listening to a certain audiobook lately, read by Stephen Fry, that is a perfect 10.


** Unfortunately, the way I wrote this paragraph allows me no way to work in a joke about someone having a thick Esperanto accent. Too bad.


*** Have we set the allusion record this time out? Close, I’ll say. Damned close.