In which we stare at a blank screen

Here’s a shocker for you. If you do something people don’t like, they storm the barricades and give you a stern talking to. (Like that ever really works.) If you do something they do like, they do not storm the barricades thanking you profusely and telling you what a great job you’re doing. Which means that it’s a good idea to take as one’s personal philosophy the idea that virtue is its own reward.

The Pups was going swimmingly until we had server issues. Since tabroom is server-based, if you’re not connected for whatever reason, you get a blank screen, and there is literally nothing you can do. As people staring at the blank screen, our little team could only curse the gods and, of course, notify CP, who was apparently well aware of the problem, since it was affecting him too. I gather after the fact that he has fixed whatever the problem was, which is way above my pay grade.

As (presumably) a result of this glitch, we had some really interesting problems. As it turned out, I had an incorrect setting on where to focus prefs, which was clear enough after having to go in and manually reassign a bunch of judges. But standard operating procedure in any case is to go over a pairing and check all the judges and fix the assignments where the prefs don’t work, so the wrong setting, aside from making more work, caused no harm. But we did have to change a lot of judges. Whatever. There were three of us, and we had at it, and we ended up with a pairing where everyone had very nice 1s and 2s and, hither and yon, the odd 3. If I’m not mistaken, at the same time the ability of the program to distribute the rooms correctly was thrown off (although this might have been later). This meant a lot of checking and room reassigning, so that judges were not in two places at the same time.

We finally got everything right, with three people, as I said, beavering away at it. We released a pairing and took a breath. What happened next was pretty much impossible for us to understand. A coach came by and was disappointed that one of his down-2s got a 3-3 judge. I sort of naturally assumed that this meant there was nothing better, and dismissed it. But as the round was going on, I took a look to find out why this might have happened—maybe it was an error on our part rather than a lack of any better judges—and found a whole slew of 4s and 5s assigned to down-2s, on a pairing three of us had vetted to insure that there was not a single 4 or 5. That is, we had meticulously cleaned up the pairing, and somehow it had gotten all dirty again. We hypothesized on how this might have happened, and obviously it was related to the server problem, but of course all we could do was the blind guessing of the ignorant. It was hard to explain to CP, too, because since we had fixed it and then it wasn’t fixed anymore on our screens, he had nothing to work with. He does connect it to the server issue, and he has addressed that, so I have no lack of confidence in the system going forward (especially since he’ll be sitting next to me in a couple of weeks at Bronx).

Anyhow, I did feel that the tournament had promised the best judging for down-2s, and we had, for this round, not delivered on that important promise. So we double-byed those rounds. I could not in good faith eliminate folks from contention because we had failed to provide them with the judges they deserved in that situation. I think this was the right decision, and as far as I know, it was accepted as the right decision. Certainly no one was harmed by it, as compared to letting the decisions stand, which may or may not have caused harm. Who knows how a 1-1 would have judged the round compared to how the 5-5 judged it?

The system eventually got back to business, but it was still dinky for a while on the room side. One of the joys of tabroom has been its handling of rooms, compared to TRPC, and the thing is, when there’s even one assignment where a judge is in two places at once, you have no alternative but to check every assignment of room and judge, both ways, for hundreds of pairings. Time flies when you’re having fun.

Thanks to the outage, one way or the other we lost almost 2 hours. Which meant we had no choice but to single-flight the run-off round, which started around 9:00 rather than 7:00. We could, I guess, have put in a single judge rather than panels, but I don’t know how that would have been received. With the virtue of hindsight, it might have been received better than the tough panels that were created. Those tough panels did cause the aforementioned storming of the barricades. I certainly didn’t disagree that many of these panels were brutal, but I can’t say that I react well to being stormed. In any case, it was what it was, and there was nothing that was going to be done about it.

The system was fine after that. Sunday we delivered virtually nothing but 1-1-1 panels. Shockingly, not one of the usual suspect coaches came in to tell us they liked the assignments. We should have tossed a few 4-3s in there just to see if they were still breathing. My guess is that they will remember to their graves the run-off, and never even think anything of the doubles, octo (bid round), quarters or semis panels. (The final, while pretty damned good in my estimation, went off prefs for an all-Pup panel, which is the tradition.)

Here’s the thing. I’m obviously a big supporter of MJP. Anyone who has read my writing knows that. But I’m also a big supporter of things like coaching your students to handle any judges, as compared to using your coaching time to go into tab to complain every time you don’t like the assigned judges. Instead of trying to teach how to persuade a diverse audience, we teach that it is better to persuade tab to deliver a different audience. I doubt if most LD circuit debaters today are capable of winning over any more than a tiny segment of particularly predisosed adjudicators. We are, at best, teaching them to preach to the choir. So it goes, and the train has left the station on this (wow—two clichés in a row), but that doesn’t mean I like it. I’ll give you all the highest prefs I can whenever I tab, because that’s why I earn the nonexistent big bucks. However, if you solicit my opinion on all of this (and perhaps even if you don’t), I’ll be happy to provide it.