Week 186: This is not a drill! This is not a drill!
Spoiler: This is a drill.
After last week's funeral and medical episodes, I was just trying to get through this week on low stress. My father is still in the hospital, but he's been moved to the rehabilitation wing, and he's doing enough physical therapy in four sessions a day. He's still recovering, but as long as his energy level's good he seems to be arrow up. That said, he's still a ways away from coming home, and I think that's a long-term not short-term goal.
So when I went back into my home office on Friday after seeing him, I was not ready for the item in my inbox. I had an email from the producer of the local program, asking if the team could fill in on a taping session . I was not prepared for such a jump scare.
I had submitted the team's information back in April, and did it again in August, but because I hadn't heard anything in the normal September timeframe, I assumed there was no chance of getting in this year. Turns out this year's schedule is running a little behind, and there was an opening so we were suddenly at the front of the line.
Everybody who's been reading this for a while is smiling, because this would be the dramatic ending the book needs. I've proposed a solution to what do you do with being put on TV with five days' notice, and the fates would conspire to give me exactly that challenge. Cast in that light this has just been a three-and-a-half year long game in telling God your plans.
Since this came in after the school day on a Friday, I indicated our interest but noted I'd have to confirm that we could have enough people there, and I'd let the show know on Monday. I then sent another email to the coach and told her we should discuss ASAP. And then I went into panic mode, blind sweaty panic mode, because there was one thing there that discombobulated me. They were changing the name of the show (OK), and they were changing the format of the show.
"Hi-ho", as Kurt Vonnegut would write.
What's the big rule I taught you? The best indicator of what will be on your show is the previous show, the second best indicator is last year's show. Well that's shot. Now what?
“Wait... There's a document attached to this. Ah, they gave me the format. Not so bad. Most of it is repositioning the existing rounds and changing the scoring around. The lightning round is moved from the end of the game to the middle and no longer gives penalties for wrong answers. The strategy changes a little, but I have it covered. The first round now involves category selection by each team. That's fine, and I worked that through in a previous week.” https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-44-on-lightning-rounds
The one section that I didn't have a ready answer for was one that looked like what might be a long tossup split like a 30-20-10 crossed with Final Jeopardy!. I hadn't seen the format in a couple years, so I was surprised to see it, and I would need to write it up for the book once I see it in practice. But for teaching it to the team, it really only meant one thing, being in first in the final round was a very strong advantage, because teams that were behind have to risk acting on the earlier clues with less information. I have familiarity with the circuit and with Buzzword to know how to handle that.
An hour staring at those rules, and I was off to football. Catie's in the band color guard, and we wanted to surprise her-slash-embarrass her by delivering cupcakes for her 16th birthday. The members of the team also go to the football game on a regular basis, so we were able to tell them to prepare. I then got to surprise Catie on the way back to the car with the news that we got the call. I was informed by my wife that the look on her face was worth it.
Full of nervous energy I proceeded to knock out about 100 questions into a document before I went to sleep. These weren't great works of art, they were things that I had been meaning to write, with a single fact or two for a common television answer, coupled with its last clue.
https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-7-commence-recycling
It's actually not difficult to do that if you've been keeping copious notes about things that could be turned into questions, and if you've automated the process of writing the last clue, you'll have a bunch of things that could get turned into questions quickly. These are the things you'd feel slightly embarrassed if someone lost because you hadn't told them. What's the acid in vinegar, what's in brass but not bronze, which president was the first to be impeached. It's the stuff you learned and you figure they did at some point, but just to be sure and just so they know how short these questions will be, let's give them some reaction plays.
Then there's the practice questions you build after the initial rush calms down. These are the ones where you want to cover a category. These are the ones you can script because you have a table of data, and can put the first second and third most mentioned books of an author into a script that outputs a sentence. You can knock out batches of these, and drop them into flashcard apps, or randomize them and read them in practice as a simulation of the show's questions that will come up in some form.
And so this is how I spent the non-birthday portion of the weekend, running on nervous tension that I missed something in all the things I've written here and in the book. I was worked up to the point that I truly felt the "I'm so excited, I'm so excited! I'M SO SCARED!" meme was taking up residence below my stomach. Monday I knocked out a powerpoint with slides for every section of the game, all the computation points I made here: https://dekidder.substack.com/p/week-176-computation-space-time-and and all the bits about how to handle questions with onscreen images that I didn't put here. I was ready for the five-day sprint to a taping day on Monday. And I was going to give the team everything they could use to push through. We just had to have a conversation with the producers after practice, and it would all be happening.
I took the call a half hour after practice. The producer remembered meeting me fifteen years ago when I tried to get teams to Pitt and CMU tournaments. It was a good conversation, but the producer had to apologize in advance. We were at the front of the line because unlike most schools in the area, Seton LaSalle doesn't take off Columbus Day. When we committed, we were actually the second of three schools needed to commit to taping that day, and that would only be the second taping under the new format. They weren’t sure they could tape an episode next Monday By this morning, it was apparent that they were having the same problem filling the show as we did filling the team, and they cancelled taping. So now, we're back in the randomized pool waiting to see when we'll be taping.
I'm sitting here still with the Jessie Spano butterfly in my stomach, typing this out, and trying to calm down. I have not been in the best of states these past few weeks and I don't think we're done with nervous tension about this and other things. I'm not foolish enough to believe that someone who follows this book in future is guaranteed a win. But faced with the very crisis I intend this book to simulate and then teach the reader how to survive, I have to think it will be successful for some, and simply allow others to maintain their sanity. It's going to give lots of teams a fighting chance, and that's all I can hope to give people.