In which we relive the Tiggers

The Tiggers was last week, and I have to admit that this has become one of my favorite weekends.

First of all, we are blessed with an abundance of rooms. Granted, some of them are in Pennsylvania, but there’s enough so that we let in pretty much everyone, within reason. In PF, for instance, reason means 60 rooms = 240 entries = 7 rounds to make it work. We got all that. This year we threw PF’s hat into the e-ballot ring, and it worked fine. As I’ve often said, if you give users something that benefits them, they will adapt to it. E-ballots means way less schlepping around, and in a place like Princeton, where there’s a nice little village in which to hang out, not having to come to a judge call and, perhaps, not get called, is a good thing. This is the last of the dominos to fall in my particular e-ballot row. All the tournaments I work on, with one or two exceptions where the high school wifi simply isn’t up to the task, are electronic. The printer has been taken out of my car for good. The revolution is over.

This is not to say that there’s nothing to do in the tab room, however. Every judge who doesn’t press start is a headache. Most have gotten the message to do their jobs, but there’s a handful of boneheads out there who haven’t. As a rule, these boneheads are not the PF parents trying to do a good job based on their limited experience, but regular “professional” judges who are anything but professionals, who are just too cool for the room. However, no one is too cool for the tab room, and we will annoy you to death until you do get with the program. We can’t run a tournament without knowing what’s going on at the furthest locations, and we don’t have an army of myrmidons with boots on the ground all over creation. You may be preffed a 1 by the majority of the students, but you’re preffed a horse’s ass by the tab room if you can’t A) press start and B) enter results. Aaarrrghhhh.

Anyhow, we threw the Paginator over into the PF world, since he works the way we do getting e-rounds to happen, and everything went fine. Maybe, if he behaves himself, we’ll let him do LD sometime again in the future, but as it turns out, he is intensely aware that there are ducks out there—hundreds of them—and they’re all looking at him with those beady little duck eyes. Normally I wouldn’t mention someone’s personal phobias—lord knows I’ve got a few myself—but any grown man who hides from ducks at the drop of a feather does not get off the hook that easily. Fortunately the duck population in Princeton is famously small. What will happen when he gets to Columbia, a well-known duck hotbed?

Kaz and I did the LD divisions, and everything went as smooth as a duck. The Congressfolk came in and out occasionally, and there was a repeat of the conversation I once had with a Tigger judge who was both there and not there when the ballots were distributed. Apparently Princeton is the home of Schrödinger’s Judge. Once was an anomaly. Twice is a pattern. 

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