In which we ignore what Wednesdays are supposed to be about

I’m nearing the end of my season. Our CFL qualifier is this weekend, and then I’m done tabbing until September. I will be down at NDCA in Orlando, but I’ll be judging PF for Lexington, all of two rounds, so at least I’ll have something to do. CP won’t be there, because he has to tend to Pennsylvania. (I’m only reporting it as I heard it.) Kaz will be judging Policy. I am prohibited from tabbing by the bylaws, but I gather no one is tabbing. Apparently they’ve decided that tabroom can handle it all by itself. We don’t need actual people in tab: they’re just featherbedders, avoiding the real work of the tournament.  Yeah, whatever. All we did at the Gem was improve nearly every MJP assignment and evenly distribute the rounds for PF, dole out too few rooms too many times, adjudicate conflicts, empanel judges for breaks, and generally keep things moving. Who needs that?

Since they’ll be doing the assignments by rounds, NDCA will not, in fact, have our problem. For reasons we don’t quite understand, tabroom does not assign rounds the way we would. In PF, there’s usually plenty of judges, for whatever reason. So what we want to do is spread the assignments around equally. Tabroom doesn’t do that. I thought it might be a vestigial result of pairing priorities for MJP, a default set of which is also over on the PF side, but removing them didn’t seem to make a difference. I want to give that more of a look, though. We’re fine pulling people who’ve judged 4 rounds out and replacing them with people who’ve been sitting on their duffs all weekend playing Minecraft, but it would be nice it this were automatic. (Come to think of it, giving everyone a couple of rounds—after the tournament starts—and then turning that off might do the trick. I won’t know until half a year from now, though.)

While I am marginally sympathetic to judges wanting rounds off, and obviously will go out of my way to do it when we have the resources, I’m not quite as sensitive to people complaining that they’ve Judged, Every. Round. when they have a scheduled two-hour break between rounds. And they do complain. Obviously a six-hour break is much more refreshing. So is jumping in the lake, which is what I recommend they do.

Anyhow, after this weekend they won’t have Menick to push around for a while. I’m turning my attention to summer fun planning. I realize that the vast majority of forensicians see summer as the opportunity to extend the already endless debate season into endless plus, but that’s the beauty of having a day job. I already have something to fill the empty hours between rounds. Sometimes having simply no rounds is the best thing of all.

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Why we don't always use e-ballots

The chief goal of a tab room is to provide fair rounds in a timely fashion. This may sound simple and straightforward, but I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t take more than a handful of people parsing that sentence for two minutes before we start disagreeing about the words chief, goal, fair and timely, either their definitions or their application. I am part of a particular group that agrees fairly deeply on most of these. I will use the evidence that this group is invited to tab just about everything in the northeast that they humanly can as an endorsement of that shared belief. (An alternative reason for our continuous invitations might be that we are the only people crazy enough to be willing to do it. I’ll leave that determination to you.)

I’ll put aside questions of fairness in this discussion. I take it as a given. Even if it weren’t, our primary tool, tabroom.com, is mechanical and blind. Further, if one of us wished to override it for some particular advantage, there is always someone else around to maintain honesty. Obviously I have no doubts about the integrity of my tabbing colleagues, but to an outsider, the presence of conflicting coaches provides the perception of fairness. The perception, in our case, matches the reality. If I were asked about how tab rooms should be staffed, however, I would always answer that there should be people representing different schools. It’s just a better way to do things all around.

The other side of the coin, then, is “in a timely fashion.” When I used to run Bump, I told the team that ending the tournament was our highest priority. That is, rounds needed to start on time and finish the appropriate amount of time later. Ballots needed to get to the judges without delay, and back tab in the blink of an eye when a round ended. Moving the tournament along was everyone’s main job.

If getting ballots to judges quickly, and getting the ballots back quickly, are paramount, why do I not use e-ballots every week? That is the question I want to answer here.

(Obviously we’ll discount the situations where there is no reliable wifi, which is more high schools than you’d might expect. The vision of fully plugged-in education is, at the moment, still only a vision for a lot of people.)

First of all, there is the question of physical plant. The only way e-ballots work is if everyone is close enough for tab to verify that the judges and the debaters are in the room when they are supposed to be, or there is enough tournament staff to do this across a tournament's entire geography. I would love to live in a world where the judges hit the start button when they start a round, but they don’t. Many hit the button as soon as they get the assignment. Many hit the button right before they enter their decision. One of the people asking us last weekend why we hadn’t e-balloted the Gem was one of the most notorious of people who hits the start button when the spirit moves him, if at all, rather than when he should. He is a top judge, always very highly preferred. If not him, who? On the other side of this, it is almost inevitably the less experienced judges who hit start when they get the assignment. One might make the argument that they need to be educated, but that will not happen. They will judge this weekend, and disappear into the ether. That is the case with the majority of PF judges. Every weekend, a different parent. Sometimes every round is a different parent. They trade assignments with their spouses. They are not in a position to live and learn. And they take up a lot of time to educate through multiple tournaments, considering that they probably won’t judge at multiple tournaments. I have trouble getting my usual suspect I mentioned above to hit a start button after at least two years now. How to I get a judge who’s registered with the first name “Mr.” to figure it out?

If we have the physical plant, we will do e-ballots, at least for LD. At some places we’ll even do it for PF, although there are always a couple of Luddites who need paper ballots even when all around them are electronic. Yes, printing ballots for them mollycoddles them and caters to the lowest common denominator. It also gets the round started on time. I can live with the opprobrium.

If we have a tournament where judges are notoriously unreliable, we will use paper ballots and, lately, judge calls. As a rule, tournaments at the Ivies fall into this category. Keep in mind that often space is at a premium, and different divisions are sharing the same rooms at different times. Dilly-dallying is not an option. I can’t offer an actual number, but there is a large percentage of attendees at Ivy tournaments who make this their one big event of the year. It’s the only tournament they travel to. The rest of the time they do local events, often just scrimmages and the like, plus maybe one circuit tournament not too far away. They are not desperate bid seekers going to every tournament on the $ircuit. They’re hacks. Amateurs. They’re there for the experience. Personally, I would like to have them come back next year, probably with all new people, to repeat the tournament experience because it was a good one, plus they got to see the university and see a few sites in the city while they were there.

Judge calls work. It is as simple as that. We tell people to be there at a certain time, we hand out the ballots, we push the handful of ballots originally assigned to people who don’t believe that 8:00 is 8:00, and then the rounds go off as they should. This works. Every time. It worked at Princeton. It worked at Penn. It worked at Columbia. All three tournaments required complex room switches as the weekend progressed. Two of them required alternative rooms between divisions. Engineering a working tournament was our job in tab. Judge calls was how we did it. (And no, we don’t do it just to rack up fines. We don’t want fines, we want judges. I don’t give a hoot about fines, unless a school or a judge conducts regular bad citizenry, in which case they should have to pay for their misdeeds.)

Note, by the way, that we were not exclusively p-ballots at Penn. We did e-ballots for two divisions of LD and one of Policy, and that worked fine because they had discrete room assignments and mostly reliable judges. One or two rounds fell through the cracks, but we coped. So we’re not mindlessly applying a no e-ballot rule wherever we go. We are applying a system that we think is best for getting a tournament moving in a timely fashion.

I do believe that we will sooner or later evolve into e-ballots wherever the host has the wifi to handle it. But I might still do some version of judge calls, just to verify that the 600 or so souls we’ve just sent across hundreds of acres of campus to different venues have some clue as to what’s happening. But I do not see a future any time soon where everyone has a device, or the ability to use that device, for e-balloting. Once a person reaches the point where a decision has been made that the person is “bad at technology”—and this decision can be made by any person over the age of about twelve, so don’t tell me it’s an old people thing (I speak for old people everywhere!) or that kids nowadays blah blah blah because they aren’t—there is no help for them. But as time goes by and the bar gets lower as the tech gets easier and more familiar, ever the worst luddites will come eventually come around. Not in the next week or two, though.

So we will continue to evaluate every tournament based on the resources of that tournament vis-à-vis staff and space, the attendees, the judges, in a word, the whole shooting match, and make what we think is the best determination. I don’t guarantee that we will always be right, but we will always be doing our best to get a tournament running in the most timely manner possible. Remember, we were there before you in the morning, and we’re going to be there later at night. And e-ballots are less work for us. And we want to get out of there. You know we’ll be doing whatever we can to make that happen.

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In which we debrief the Re-Gem

Pagination is a real thing. It is what people do so that books look good. Literally it is the act of turning pages into text, but when books are laid out automatically (we use InDesign), they don’t necessarily look as good as they can. Loose lines, widows and orphans, that sort of thing. So someone goes through and paginates, so that the final text is pleasing to the eye. It can also be in aid of shortening or lengthening text, i.e., the number of lines, if you have some sort of parameter to meet. Around the DJ, it’s the act of making nice visually. It is one of those wonderful activities that only occasionally draws on your skills of literally doing it; mostly you’re listening to music and thumbing through pages and finding nothing, until you do find something and have to address it. Then again, the reason I refer to Marty P as the Paginator has nothing to do with the above, or anything else more interesting than his actual last name and my tendency to give people nicknames, some of which are way better than others. I’m especially proud of pure coinages like the Panivore, I’m happy with Peanuts, Burgers, Speedy and Stealth, I can live with initials just to save time, although they’re entirely for use here, as I never turn to Palmer and say, “Hey, CP, what’s up?” Come to think of it, I can’t remember ever turning to anyone and saying “What’s up?” but that’s another issue entirely.

I mention all of this because now Monagle is wondering what he needs to do to get a nickname. Beats me. Take up some weird habit, or better yet, disclose some weird habit: if he were an eeler on the side, or a semi-professional kick boxer, or a master prestidigitator, then we might have something. Become an Irish citizen and change his name to O’Mangle? French and La Gnome? Become a place so you can be a Monagwesian? I don’t know. This is all a matter of inspiration, not perspiration, and you can see the sweat in this paragraph. Pfui.

Meanwhile, the Re-Gem worked out. I can’t recall any invitationals that have gotten canceled and then reborn on another weekend and ended up respectably. I can’t remember any, period. We certainly weren’t as big as Gem 1.0, but we were big enough. I mean, we didn’t have enough rooms, so we were big enough for that. The thing is, the university holds rooms for the normal weekend; other activities already had their claims in for this one. But still, about 100 PFers ain’t hay, and they were extremely competitive. So was the half-that LD division. A few people came from far and wide (including Vancouver), but mostly it was the northeast. Understandable.

Of course, you want to hear about all the bad stuff. Tabroom worked pretty well. It did a couple of quirky things that we might not have done, but once we saw it we could see the inherent albeit mechanical reasoning, and we left things as they were. I mean, once you start farting around with a pairing, you’d better have a damned good reason for it, because the odds are you’re going to make things worse, not better. On the opposite side, with a small field/pool, prefs were pretty damned good. We didn’t have to tinker much with panels at all; improvement wasn’t going to happen. There was much discussion of e-ballots versus p-ballots: I’ll talk about that tomorrow.

We did have one bollix. Gemmers were entering the ballots, and for round 6 they gave the job to a different team without telling them about switching sides in PF, which means that a goodly portion of a round was entered incorrectly. We paired not knowing this, but we found out in about two seconds, as the judges started throwing tomatoes at us in judge call. Unfortunately, it meant that some teams who thought they had broken in fact hadn’t because the brackets were redistributed, and we could only break the top 32. Total points ended up being the deciding factor, and if you can’t drop highs and lows, you really don’t want a 26 on there. Need a reason to work toward the best possible speaker points, which usually requires reading your judges and responding to that read? Speaker points matter, and speaking per se matters in PF, where so many of the judges are not terribly experienced. Sounding good doesn’t replace being good, but it sure helps it along.

Other than that, nothing sticks out. It was a pretty smooth weekend, with the Paginator and Monagle on speech and congress, and Kaz and I and Catholic Charlie handling the debate chores. Aside from the incident above, there wasn’t any storming of the barricades. We did have one self-proclaimed protest of a PF round, but since we were operating under NSDA rules, you really have to make the protest in the round and make the protest the voting point, and then come to the directors and claim that the judge was wrong, and even then good luck, because the presumption is always for the judge in the round. Complaining that the judge should have done what the judge didn’t do won’t hack it, even if the opponents did something wrong. We concluded that they didn’t, much less that the protest couldn’t stand because it wasn’t appropriately called in the round. Of course the bottom line is that PFers and evidence are a mug’s game, and the rules don’t help much at the point where there’s paraphrasing. Another word to the wise: don’t ever paraphrase. Forget that the rules allow it. If you do it, it is not as good a strategy as not doing it. A real card saying “25%” versus a distilled blip saying “not a lot” are not the same thing. 

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In which we head uptown

We’re circling over the Gem, wishing it were bigger. We had plenty of rooms, sort of, for the blizzard version, but not so many for the reboot. It’s always hard to get Gem rooms in the first place; trying to get them in the second place is well night impossible. So we’re being creative. And praying that a lot of the creeping crud affects the various fields tonight.

We’re still looking pretty good sizewise for a reboot on an odd weekend. A bunch of people bit the dust yesterday when they were told that, no, you can’t come without any adults. This isn’t free time in the kindergarten playground. At least they didn’t come and pretend they were chaperoned. I am very much one to demand to see your adult, at which point the little darling disappears and comes back a moment later with a recent immigrant with a checkbook, which satisfies the requirement. Just don’t put them in the judge pool.

I’ll also be patrolling for partial judges. People start saying that so-and-so will miss round 1 or round 432 or whatever, which is fine by me, that will be $50. If you can’t bring judges who are actually at the tournament for their rounds, they’re really not judges. Everyone on your judge list is there to judge. End of story. And please hate me for insisting on this, because I’m happy to put up with your opprobrium but I couldn’t stand it if you tried to be friendly to me. Ain’t happening. Don’t try. We’ll both be happier.

Kaz and I will choo-choo in to arrive at around 2:30. Plenty of time to get organized and pray for more rooms to fall out of the sky for us. Once again we’ll do judge calls, since K seems to really get off on them, and I’m happy to play straight man every now and then. (FYI, in the Vaudeville days, the straight man always got paid more than the comic. Curious.) As the last big event of the season, it will be a nice (I hope) happy ending. Followed next week by the CFL Grands. Then WDWNDCA. Then… Beats me. I’m sure I’ll find something.

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So why do some people name Wednesday after Mercury?

I mean, Mercredi? Dies Mercurit? When it's really Odin's day? Wodnesdaeg? That's just wrong in so many ways. It's immoral. It's illegal.

It's French.

Actually, Odin/Woden is apparently equated for some reason with Mercury, who seems a little less mighty, if you ask me, but you didn't, and there we are.

Anyhow, from the looks of things, this might be the last episode of Nostrum, Series 3, the COC, given how episode 9 turns out. Don't believe me? Check it out for yourself at http://nostrumnation.blogspot.com. Would I lie to you?

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In which we quote script writer Robert Towne

In addition to the intense nuttiness on the part of the attendees at the Land o’ Lakes, good old tabroom definitely wasn’t feeling up to snuff, so there was also intense nuttiness on the operational side. Brian M claimed that it was a result of carrying over an old tournament. Maybe, but poltergeists seem more likely, if you ask me.

Rooms came and went. There were clearly pools assigned, but when asked to use the rooms in those pools, tabroom became snooty and only used some of them. Easy fix, but annoying.

Brackets were meant to be broken, apparently. A couple of divisions required repairing, for no apparent reason, and more often than once.

Judges disappeared from their pools, although that one definitely was a result of the old-tournament carryover, because they were scheduled to be somewhere, out there, not here. (Here we paint screens, if you’re of the Sondheim persuasion.) Brian plugged that leak up.

One team disappeared entirely somewhere during breaks. This was the biggest poser. Certainly no one in tab took them out. They had broken into elims, and I was pairing a round subsequent to one that looked done when somebody pointed out that the preceding round wasn’t done, and that we were still waiting for results. Lo and behold, there was a hole where the name of one of the teams should be. We sent, first, our NSDA rep, Deano, up to investigate. He disappeared into the L o’ L vortex, and wasn’t heard from ever again. We sent an army of Lakewegians up to investigate after a while, and they too disappeared into the L o’ L vortex. Those of us in tab were too scared to go ourselves, fearing that we too would never be heard from again, so we sent for the team that hadn’t disappeared from tabroom and, eventually, managed to find the team that had disappeared. There was no reason that we could discover that they had been apparated from the tournament, which is extremely difficult magic, as we all knew. We were sure we hadn’t done it, and we thought maybe that the school had done it themselves, but then again, they couldn’t drop a team after a tournament closed registration, so, well, there you are. A mystery wrapped in an enigma on rye with extra mayonnaise. One of the missing teamsters had even won, and picked up, a speaker award right before the puff of smoke that took her away. We recreated their school and put them back in, which was easy enough, but, as I say, go figure. We couldn’t. And still can’t.

Given the small number of schools, and the tendency of schools to dominate one area of the brackets—that is, all of X school is 3-0, all of Y school is 0-3—we had to do some fancy dancing to keep the bracket-breaking sane. I did one round entirely on the fly while Kaz and Brian were solving some other impenetrable problem, and was rather pleased with myself. CP swears that he has a better way of pairing that he will put in eventually, but then again, Nixon had a secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Whatever.

I am trusting that none of the above problems arise this week at the Gem Revival. I mean, it was— Well, if I said it once to Sheryl, I said it a hundred times: