In which we finally come up with the perfect coinage

In what has to be record-setting, I’ve gotten my first attempt from a school to weasel out of its break-round obligation—six weeks in advance of the tournament. Those of us in the tab room love when someone tries to skip out early. It inspires us, because we want to skip out early too. I would love to go home Saturday night instead of lurking around Sunday. I could be lounging in my comfy chair doing the crossword puzzle at my leisure instead of sitting in a hard wooden chair in some drafty classroom doing the crossword puzzle between interruptions of people attempting to weasel out of their judging obligation.

We got a lot of this at Rather Large Bronx. We did set up a Sunday pool. For all practical purposes, we bumped about 25 % of the judges, all of whom had no teams still in play and who were at the bottom of the pref list. I mean, they weren’t going to judge anything, so why pretend otherwise? It was a gesture of goodwill on our part. And it left us with a 50% overage of our needs for doubles, more than enough to fill in for any no-shows with a decently preffed substitute. Not that we had any subs, though. Everyone showed up on Sunday at the Bronx, on time, fit as a fiddle and ready for love. That may have been a first, at least since the days when Soddy used to sit at the door to the building and hand out the ballots himself, just praying for a no-show he could hound until the end of time. Who would have dared to face that? Anyhow, I like the idea of a standby list, if the tournament has enough judges to handle it. I don’t want to get up for nothing on a Sunday morning any more than the next person. A reasonable chance you might get called? Okay. No chance in hell? Let ‘em ride.

Still, there seems to be a general lack of understanding among inexperienced folk (and a few experienced folk) about why they need to be there if their teams are no longer in it. I think I’m going to try my hand at creating a document that explains it. I don’t know how successful that will be, since even Kaz, the greatest explainer since the invention of explaining, can’t seem to get it through people’s thick skulls when they come to tell us that they’re hightailing it out of there that they really need to stay.

Which, of course, reminds me of the classic variety of aggression shown by the traveling tab team, which we defined as passive-aggressive (JV), aggressive-aggressive (moi) and educational-aggressive (Kaz). But it is so obvious, it is so clear, it is so right, that I can’t believe it’s taken me or any of us this long to come up with it: Kazsplaining. When Sheryl Kazsplains things to people, that usually is the end of it.