In which we marvel over technology a little heading into a quiet weekend

I worked on the Brotherly Lovers judge hires last night. Absolutely amazing. Teams with over 20 entries, from almost literally down the street, requesting 100% hired judge coverage. Say what? I do have a solution for them. In PF, at least, most debaters have adults of one sort or another with whom they live and dine and go on annual trips to Wal-Mart’s to buy new school togs. (“Hey, Mom, these bowties look swell!”)  I’ll bet anything that you can put a pencil into the hands of some of these adults and, lo and behold, make judges out of them. Jeesh. The thing is, I think a lot of schools imagine that college tournaments have endless judge hires just waiting to be taken out of the freezer and thawed and tossed straight into the rounds as needed. As I said yesterday, judges tend to go to the people who travel the furthest, for the obvious reason of the prohibitive expense of carrying extra baggage, or more to the point, carrying extra people with normal baggage. Plane tickets and hotel rooms are expensive, so we try to service those folks. You’re coming in on a bus from half an hour away? Not so expensive. Since we don’t have that freezerful of judges just waiting to go, we’ve got to make the best of what we have. Plus there’s the need to keep a few spares on hand for the sake of a higher quality pool and tabbing needs and covering the dodos who show up without a judge who, even though you say you will, you really don’t want to turn away. I find it to be almost mental comfort food that people keep demanding all these judges every time. It’s always exactly what I expect, and that’s what I get.

I’ve been around the block a few too many times, I guess.

On the bright side, I went out to Whole Foods at lunchtime today and got to use Apple Pay for the first time. Okay, I’m done. I never want to have to go through the agony of having to reach into my wallet for a credit card again. Yes, the idea of saving all that time (a good second or so per purchase) may not be so impressive, but the coolness factor is what it’s all about. Here! Let me pay for that!

For those wondering why I haven’t been talking about it, I will not be attending the Bobcat, so there’s nothing to talk about. So it goes. I only talk about tournaments I don’t attend when there’s illustrative shenanigans worth analyzing. Otherwise all tournaments are more or less alike. People come, people go, nothing ever happens. The fact that I’ve managed to wrangle over 3000 posts on such nothingness does make one wonder.