Oy, as they say in the CFL. The Paginator and I entered
about fifty thousand paper ballot results at the Regis Kristmas Chlassich. I’d
forgotten what a pain that can be. Every time you turn around, another ballot
wants entering. I’d rather yell at the e-judges to press the start button
any day of the week.
The RKC was, overall, uneventful. While I was making my
traditional opening remarks (the ones that, even if people listen to them, they
ignore), Marty was getting the ballots printed up. Imagine my chagrin when
he arrived sans ballots, plaintively crying that the ballots wouldn’t print, and
then disappearing to either never return to this horrible place, or to fix it.
Fortunately, it was the latter. Apparently Catholic Charlie, who gave us the
Christmas Presents of his Absence (he was up Naticking) figured out that it was
a non-printing character in the ballot instructions. Good gravy! Could it be
that CP has simply left a bunch of IEDs in the programming when it comes to
paper ballots? I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyhow, we did ultimately get things
rolling, and paper ballots were distributed, and, as I said, we spent the rest
of the day entering them.
I had set the tournament up for teams to check themselves
in, and then I saw that a school that was as likely to be all here as Donald
Trump is likely to turn off Fox News was the first to check in, about a half
hour early. This set off the old claxon, and I turned off the check-yourself-in feature. Shockingly, that school was indeed all here, as the
adult who wanted to pay me said as he was walking out the door, leaving them
chaperone-less. More claxons, and eventually one of the kids’ parents showed up
to be there when they fell down the stairs and broke their noggins. Anyhow, the
point of this is that one needs to be very thoughtful about having teams check
themselves in, especially when there’s a possibility of shenanigans. One
school, with which I had communicated during the week, telling them, to wit,
that they weren’t exactly signed up for the tournament, showed up anyhow with
puzzled looks on their faces and an announcement that they were independent. I
explained to them that when they fell down the stairs and broke their noggins,
the fact that they were independent meant that their parents would sue the crap
out of me, Regis and the horse they rode in on, as compared to being an
official entry, in which case their broken noggins would be just another
fracture in the daily life of el-hi students. They abjectly went off into the darkness, never to be seen again.
It was that kind of day all day. Give everybody 25 points
and don’t fill out a ballot, and get your knickers in a twist when I suggest,
perhaps not too kindly, that you’re a #&*$ idiot and to do what I told
everyone to do in the opening remarks. This particular judge claimed to have
listened to those remarks, which meant that he was willfully ignoring them
rather than arrogantly being elsewhere because, as he claimed, he was the best
debater in the country starting with his very first round lo these many years
ago. He’s a junior now. He vowed never to return again, after the way I treated
him. I think he meant this as a punishment for me. I also think he misread the
signs.
We did finally get things wrapped up, and the Paginator and
I strolled down Madison on a very balmy evening and settled in for a nice meal
at a Brazilian restaurant. Marty downed his first feijoada. JV had previously
warned him that it was made from all the parts of the animals that 1) no one
usually eats, that 2) are rejected as being too gross for inclusion in the country’s
sausage-making, but that was just not true. Drink a couple of caipirinhas
first, and you can eat anything.
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