Debate Tournament: Days 12-14

This tournament has made a mess of my life. Perhaps I am being a tad melodramatic, but I feel it is warranted. Let me tell you a bit about how my weekend went.

I ended up working continuously from 7:00 am until past midnight both Saturday and Sunday. I missed all of my naps, considering I did not ever have more than fifteen minutes of downtime at a time (and I couldn't have had more than an hour total each day, including meals and bathroom breaks). I've been running on about three hours of sleep the past three days, and I'm really burnt out. In other words, I'm a flaming wreck (or perhaps a wreck that was at some point on fire, but now has fizzled out, and is spewing forth occasional gouts of toxic smoke).

See, what happened was, they had me staffing the judge room. I wasn't originally assigned there; I was supposed to be on building patrol. It just so happened that the area I was patrolling happened to include the judge room, which for some reason, had nobody on staff. I was sort of roped into staying there, and was basically manning the desk alone on Friday. Tab sent somebody to help during high-traffic times, and one of the judges in the room who saw how overworked I was volunteered to help, but I was basically in charge, as a freshman, having just learned the ropes on the job.

Saturday was a bit better. Varsity LD and varsity CX started their first rounds on Saturday morning, adding two events to the four (JV LD, JV CX, Public Forum, and Parli) I was already handling. But seeing how utterly shorthanded I was, an alumnus of the university who had significant experience in judge room management was assigned to help me. Also, a few Tab people helped set up the 8:00 am outgoing varsity ballots. Still, the day was grueling, if only because of the long, continuous hours. I later learned from the alumnus that a few years ago, when he was still a college student, not only were there separate varsity and JV judge rooms (and PF had not yet been created), but there were also three people assigned to each room. Three! You can imagine my dismay when I found out.

That night, I got about three hours of sleep.

Sunday was pretty similar, at least through preliminary rounds. Might I add that we kept things running very much on schedule, more so than just about any tournament I've ever seen (debate tournaments are notorious for running hours behind schedule)? That, I'm quite proud of. Two people staffing for six events, and we still managed to get ballots out and rounds started at nearly the slated times.

Then elimination rounds happened, and people started leaving in droves. It was very hard to find enough judges to fill all the three-judge panels for all the different events! We ended up having to pull a lot of Stanford debaters from their assigned jobs to judge rounds, sometimes in events they had very little experience in. We had a lot of college parli debaters judging PF (which is fine, actually, because PF is designed for a lay judge) and JV LD (not as good, because LD is more specialized -- though the heavy duty jargon and spreading doesn't usually happen until one hits varsity, so it's not as bad as one might imagine). I wanted to judge, and I've experience in pretty much everything except CX, but I was necessary in judge room (basically chained to the desk the whole weekend). Ah well. Everything that was supposed to end on Sunday ended by 12:30, I believe, so I spent some time cleaning up and closing down the judge room, and then ferrying things between Tab and various vehicles (in the rain, no less). I had forgotten to bring a jacket, and was stupidly wearing sandals, so by the time I stumbled into the dorm lounge, I was cold, wet, and bone tired. It was a little after 1:00, methinks. And then I had homework to do.