Week 164: Richard Scarry's What Do Quiz Bowl People Do All Day?
Thursday through Sunday
Thursday was Take Your Child to Work day, or would have been had there been a crowd at work. I spent Thursday at my office, and had Catie there for a bit of the time, so we did all the things I meant to do during the previous three years, I showed her the new cubicle she’d never been to before, the coffee machine that people from the other building come over to use, and gave her a ten minute lecture on how daily regression tests run, and the basic equation that starts all our simulations: Hooke’s Law. While giving her the dime tour, it struck me that this was basically the bleakest view of the future I could show her. An empty floor with four people working where you could fit 200. It’s settled down in my mind that this is what it’s going to be in my office from now on. I’m in no danger of losing my spot, I had fears that they were going to move us all back when the lease is up, but we’re essential over in building 2 because our kitchen is also the conference center, and 20 days a year of people coming in is probably enough justification. Still, Catie thought enough of the trip that she told Dana that now she wants to be an engineer, because engineers get good coffee machines.
On the way out, to lunch, we took the elevator, and I noticed that the clear antiviral coating on the elevator’s buttons were gone, leaving the ridged concentric circles I hate to touch. All in all, the elevator now looks exactly like March 1, 2020, and it opens into March 30, 2020. To borrow from William Gibson: The normal, like the future, is not being evenly distributed.
Friday morning I rose way too early and made my way to the airport. The cheapest flights back and forth to Chicago are the first Southwest shuttle over and the last shuttle back, and I’ve been using those for years. Maybe it was the before dawn ten minute walk from car to airport, or the long silent people movers to a barely populated security gate, but the whole voyage in seemed empty.
Where last year I ended up just happy to be at a tournament, I found myself this year meditating on the empty spaces and the empty time. Because I was still dog tired, I sat, mask on, between Midway concourses and let my phone charge from 8 to 9. Then I took the train to the Hyatt Regency, and did a little work in a secret spot by Grand Ballroom that as far as I can tell, only I and some of the cleaning staff know of. Everything seemed underpopulated and an hour away from its appointed time, like 5am had been extended to half past noon. Even the hotel room seemed emptied out, with too much space around me.
When things run a little too efficiently, you’re left with time on your hands. That was how I felt about 1pm Sunday. We had finished our duties in the room, packed the buzzer, returned it to buzzer control, and I went back to control where I waited for my next instruction. While waiting for round 22, I leaned against the wall, amazed I hadn’t hit 10,000 steps, hadn’t been moving stuff around all weekend, and hadn’t generally exhausted myself with the whole process. Switching to electronic packets, electronic scoresheets, QR codes, and apps had taken 5000 steps a day out of my weekend routine. And for a moment, just a moment, I kind of missed all the hard work for a purpose.
I’m sure that feeling will pass.
I got to spend two rounds of the championship as third official. It's a quirk of the championships, but it seems like a baffling position to some, like prothonotary. When we get down to the end, and there's more people who can help out than slots available, NAQT members get tasked with third officials. As much as I appreciate having a task to do, third official is never going to feel like something that utterly necessary. Instead of it making it a special occasion, it’s like the introduction of the extra umpires for the World Series, yes it’s important to make sure that they’re there, but they aren’t a necessity, just a flourish.
Third Official is not a redundancy, it's there for a reason, but the reason varies from moment to moment. You’re there to check everything stays working, so that the moderator and scorekeeper can keep moderating and scorekeeping. When we did virtual championships, the third official was there to, in the words of Emily Pike: “Prevent shenanigans,” but when you’re in-person, shenanigans are going to be visible to more than just the third official.
So my third official job was running a cyclic checklist:
Are we on the right question? Are the buzzers set properly? Is there a timeout coming? Is there a problem with the question? Check left! Check right! Did the scorekeeper get that? Are we on the right question?…
One of the biggest referee moments in quiz bowl stemmed from having a third official there. When there was a question in a final match about whether a player had begun their answer before time was called, the third official remembered that the match was being recorded, and that the recording tracks were displayed on a copy of audacity running on a laptop to the side. The third official quickly checked the waveforms coming from the two audio channels, recognized which was the moderator from the moderator calling to stop the clock, and was able to give the correct call quickly. It’s not much, but that moment was necessary and I was happy to be in the pit when it happened.
The Sunday night shuttle was also empty. I had checked in on the train, way later than the 24 hours before that you should, and got “A 58” for a Southwest lineup number, something I’ve never gotten before. After I stretched out in an empty four person table in the airport food court, and the top ten in each division got their press releases, I walked down the less full halls to my flight. I waited out the delay (the pilot was ten minutes late but felt like thirty,) and slid into a window seat as the steward repeated “There’s a hundred empty seats on this flight!”
The normal is not being distributed evenly.