In which we break out and get down

I’ve decided to break out material about tabroom.com from Coachean Life into a separate site when that material can be useful from a how-to perspective. That is, the legendary (or perhaps mythical) Traveling Tab Room (primarily myself, Kaz, O’C and JV) have adventures every weekend that might help someone else work their way through this big and complicated system. In addition to describing our problems and how we solved them, I’ll post hints and tips people might find useful. The first post is on Bracketing Issues.

CP thinks we always have problems because we’re just lousy at tabbing; we all think otherwise. I’ll let you be the judge of who’s right and who is simply taller than everyone else.

Meanwhile, the non-tabbing high point of tabbing Newark was the revelation that I no longer am able to communicate to anyone under the age of thirty. When I told a Newark kid that a certain judge was guaranteed to “turn up,” the entire tournament broke down in wild hysterics. O’C immediately felt compelled to report this verbal blunder on Facebook (which maybe I shouldn’t take too seriously, because he feels compelled to report everything that ever happens to him on Facebook). I wasn’t terribly taken aback that, A) a perfectly common English language idiom had been coopted for other idiomatic uses, or B) that I haven’t kept up with the way these damned kids talk nowadays, no doubt because I spend too much time shooing them off my lawn rather than listening to them talk “hip” to one another. We solved the problem by having O’C go with me for the rest of the tournament whenever I needed to talk to a young person, to translate on the fly. Who knew that the phrase “Do you have the ballot yet?” translates as “Can I take your grandmother to the Virgin Islands for a weekend of wild and wooly shenanigans that you’re not old enough to know about,” or that “Where’s the judges’ lounge?” translates as “There’s a toilet on your head, you yabbo?” 

There is still so much to learn.