In which we document the Revolt of the PF Judges, or, The Battle of Basking Ridge

So, sez ye, how was Ridge?

Well, sez I, let me clean off the gore before I go into the details.

Ridge, of course, is the other former Bump weekend, the one I started on before moving to the former Newburgh weekend. (All of this information is in the official tournament program, yours for only $10 plus tax—can’t follow the game without a program!) So I have a fondness for this date, and a tacit joy at not hosting a tournament on it. Especially after the majorness of the Tiggers, it’s nice to relax in a tab room and have no responsibilities other than making nice pairings. Somehow, though, problems do tend to work their ways through the hatches, no matter how battened down we are.

Early on in the tournament, the school wifi was a little less than cooperative. The solution to this is usually to muddle through; after the unforensical Ridgewegians all go home, things will clear up. Instead, the PF judges (mostly) took this opportunity to storm into tab and defiantly rip out their tabroom linking. “I spit on your tabroom.com,” they cried, throwing their computers to the ground and stomping on them. Kaz would try to explain that they could use their phones to enter the data, but they would then pull out their rapiers and wave them into the air saying, “I spit on your phones and their data!” and then throw their smartphones on the ground and stomp on them too. One judge came in and asked for paper ballots because he couldn’t do numbers on his iPhone. I'm not making this up. I decided that there is no answer to such a request other than to hand the person a paper ballot. After the great success at Princeton with e-ballots, suddenly it was Damn the torpedoes, full speed astern, and the game was over. The Luddites, for the moment, had won. They rose on a tide of flummoxia and sailed off into the paper sunset, proudly crowing of their victory.

It will be a long fight back for the 21st century. I am reluctant to pick a winner, at least over the short term. We are now girding our loins for the Gem of Harlem. To E or not to E, that is the question.

Meanwhile, tabroom was fine, and the pairings were easy enough. Still, there were things that were unique to Ridge, that should be mentioned:

• This is the first tournament I have attended that had a pizza desk. I don’t think they had a ballot table, or a help desk, but if you had pepperoni on the brain, there was a place for you.
• When the answer to the question “Where is the judge?” is “In the bathroom,” you have to wonder when, if ever, you will get a decision.
• We will be submitting a serious request that the “Replace and fine” button be renamed the “Replace and flog” button. We don’t want their money. We want their blood.
• Thanks to the Paginator, I finally know why there is such a thing as emergency underwear. I will be buying him some for Christmas.
• The song M.T.A. (“Oh, he never returned/No, he never returned/And his fate is still unlearned”) is pretty much the theme song of the place, as one runner after the other, sent to evaluate this or that situation, never returned. I hope they came back at some point today. I’d hate to think that they were devoured by debate.

The most unique Ridgewegian thing—worthy of its own paragraph rather than just another bullet point—is the Spreadsheet. Whereas the tab room is operating under the belief that they are somehow the people determining the debaters, the judges and the rooms, apparently there is a magical, nay mystical, Spreadsheet that tells the seven or eight hundred runners in the building these things quite differently from how we imagine them. We have never seen this so-called Spreadsheet, and hope that we never will. We simply bow to its authority: It is the Age of Trump, after all. Anything is possible.

And that about sums it up. Battle-scarred though I am, I will venture forth this weekend for the Regis CFL at Stuyvesant, or the Stuyvesant CFL that should be at Regis, AKA the Kristmas Klassic, AKA the Christmas Chlassic. Blessed peace will ensue, I am sure.

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