I remember very clearly when I first started working in tab rooms how Richard Sodikow would run things from his clunky old Macintosh (clunky, that is, compared to the Macs of today). He sat on the closest thing in the given tab room to the throne therein, barking orders to his assembled myrmidons, typing away. Food would be brought in on silver trays from the judges’ lounge by a never ending parade of eunuchs, although I may be misremembering that last bit. But then every now and then there would be a stop in all activity when Soddie pressed the button to pair the next round. Everyone would hold their collective breath, waiting. And here was the thing. To make the round pair successfully—no certainty in those days of TR for the Mac—Soddie would slowly rotate his finger on the touchpad of the computer, making little continuous little circles until the program finally output the completed schematic. The collective breath of the room would exhale, Soddie would lift his finger, the parade of aphrodisiacs from the judges’ lounge would resume, the printer would start chugging away, and the tournament would continue apace until the next pairing.
I never questioned anyone about that circling finger, but I noticed that Soddie wasn’t the only one to do it. I just accepted it as part of the magic of making a tournament happen. Maybe it was a Mac thing. You had to rub the belly of the beast to make it purr, it seemed. When Jules and the Nostrumite wrote this up in Nostrum, they used the metaphor of sacrificing a goat to explain what happened in the sanctum sanctorum of the tab room. That seemed to be a reasonable comparison. The tab rooms were always closed, no one was allowed in and no one ever came out, information was sealed, and as often as not, things broke down and the sacrifices, so to speak, didn’t always satisfy the anger of the gods. So it went.
All of which is prelude to my oversight in not bringing a goat with me to the CFL tournament last Saturday, the legendary Regis Kristmas Klassik (AKA the Christmas Chlassich). A timely sacrifice could have been very helpful. The thing is, it turns out that tabroom.com needs its nasty little belly rubbed just as much as the old TR for the Mac. As I sauntered into the tab room Saturday after the registration closed (theoretically, as it seemed as if everyone who knew last week how to check in automatically had forgotten, and I had to pull teeth to find out who, exactly, had shown up that day) and confidently sat down at the computer, I encountered the first really disastrous inability to get things done correctly. The rounds that we were able to pair used rooms from the wrong pools. At least one round wouldn’t pair at all. According to CP, who, fortunately, was available, the former problem arose from my not rubbing the belly of the beast after making the room pools. I was supposed to save all the individual schedules again. Oh, yeah. That’s obvious. If you don’t do things in the right albeit secret order, they don’t get done. Which means if, for no particular reason, you’ve been doing it “correctly” in the past and this time you don’t, you have your friend James from Bro Tech manually enter the correct rooms (which, at least, you’ve learned to print out in advance for just such a contingency) while you try to figure out why this one particular division won’t double-flight. Well, in that case, a button I didn’t even know existed was clicked. Needless to say, CP would insist that I had pressed that button, and just as needless to say, I would insist that I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole dancer. Since I blog more than he does, even when I'm not blogging much, it is obvious that I am right and he is wrong.
A half hour later than our proposed start, we kicked things off. The good news is that we were only running three rounds, and until all the policy judges decided to go to one of the local gin mills before round 3—yes, seriously, they did all disappear for no reason whatsoever, given the fact that they were given a half hour break, minimum, for lunch—we never got more than that half hour off the mark. Curiously, aside from our starting friction, this event also became quickly identifiable as the Tournament of the Disappearing Maverick. First of all, we started out with mavericks up the wazoo. Then there would be more mavericks. Then there were mavericks who were turning into teams with two unique individuals, then they were one again, and then they were quitting the tournament, but then they wanted to come back, or leave again, or whatever. As a rule, I’m okay with mavericks at events like this, at it is better to debate with a handicap than to stay home and play Minecraft, but this time out, it seemed as if we had more lone motherless dogies than bona fide pairs, but in ever-recombining configurations. Go figure.
Anyhow, at the end of the day, the day ended (if there’s one mindless phrase I really hate, it’s “at the end of the day,” but here I'm using it literally, so the usage is excusable). Trophies were distributed, my little team of novices placed nicely, my judge picked up all her ballots, and I stuffed my pockets with the extra medals to give to Catholic Charlie next time I see him, if not before. Which meant that, for the next two weeks, I have no debates and, aside from a boatload of reading, no DJ.
I rewarded myself for this by upgrading my Spotify. I’m typing this while listening to the UK cast of “She Loves Me.”
Life is good. Sometimes.
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