http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G1IMM5XOwaM

Much as I hate to see anyone need to take a medical withdrawal, it was nice that one happened on Sunday—it allowed us to verify that Dan’s overnight fix had corrected the bug from Saturday.

Sunday also gave us another example of the advantages of separately posting pool results and tableau. Someone in the Division I Women’s Saber event (why, I wonder, were most of the problems in Portland in saber?) came to us, wondering why it appeared that 83 fencers were promoted to DEs when the format sheet said that only 77 would be promoted. That’s how we caught that operator error, where the DE round was set to the default 80% promotion rate instead of the 75% it should have been. A quick and easy fix, but one we don’t want to have to do at SN.

The most remarkable part of Monday was that I was able to start releasing strips to the armorers for teardown by about 1:30 pm. It used to be routine for teardown to begin (or for the fencing to end) that early, but it’s been years since that was possible. Our strip layout was odd and awkward for a number of reasons (the armorers even stashed some replacement equipment under the BC stage so that it would be more accessible than it was from their armory in the far corner), but it was a great layout for teardown. The first section released (pods A–E) was far enough from where the fencing continued that the teardown process was barely noticeable, and by the time I released the back section (pods H–K), fencing was down to only the replay pod (G) and the finals strip.

Our 3D Tetris is easier than it was when this photo was taken in March 2011.

We’re getting better at packing up the BC crate, too. We paged some armorers to help get the server case into the crate—it’s astonishing how much easier it is for six people than just three to lift that sucker over the side of the crate. And once we got the server into the crate, the 3-dimensional game of Tetris that is making all our bins and boxes fit went much more quickly and easily than in the past. After congratulating ourselves on our cleverness, we realized that the improvement was mostly due to the reduction in the number of boxes from registration that we had to include—apparently, J.R. and Joe [Sibley—known familiarly among BC types as "Office Joe" to distinguish him from our Joe Salisbury, aka Coffee-Joe] had pared what they ship from one event to the next.

Joe sent me the stats for the live results over the weekend. We had a bit under 7,000 unique visitors, who each averaged 2.46 visits. Joe had set the server bandwidth to his normal default, and both he and Dan and a couple of other tech geeks reacted to the “bandwidth exceeded” message that popped up on Saturday with “Cool!” Joe says we used in a day and a half what is usually a full month’s usage for most of his clients. He bumped up the capacity an order of magnitude or so, so there were no further bandwidth issues.

But we’ve definitely got a hit with the live results.

Update [1/21/12, 10:43 pm]: Joe (that would be Salisbury) suggests I should have mentioned—because it was such a nice big number—that the total  page views on the results site as of the morning of January 18 was 105,794, and that there were visitors from more than 60 countries. He’s right—I should have.

The Foucault pendulum in the lobby of the Oregon Convention Center is one of the prettiest I've ever seen, but I never did figure out how the disks reset through the day.

Saturday turned out to be just as interesting as Friday was.

We began to be more comfortable with the new look of all the paper we were working with. FT is flexible about how you can print everything—we can have pods and/or quadrants and/or page numbers and/or table brackets and/or a unique bout ID number with or without an accompanying barcode on the DE bout slips. We experimented a bit with the placement of all these items to get the most helpful combination, so that everyone could use whichever bit worked best for them.

XSeed’s unique identifier is the fencer number, derived from the alphabetical list of everyone entered in the entire tournament. It took most of a day for those of us working the table side to quit having to slap our hands to stop our automatic search back up the tableau to find that fencer number we no longer needed to worry about, and a bit longer not to feel like we were forgetting something by writing only the fencer’s name on the slip.

We discovered one advantage to FT’s use of the unique bout ID when someone inadvertently handed a stack of bout slips to the wrong computer operator, who didn’t notice that they weren’t for her event before she entered them. She scanned the barcodes, which pulled up the proper bouts in the proper event, and they were all entered properly into the correct event without her having to switch from the event she’d been working in. We just have to be careful that the bout slips all end up in the correct physical folders.

Another cool thing is that FT lets you print whatever range of the tableau you want. So if we’re stopping at the 16 to move to the replay pod, we can print the tableau only up to that point, and then print out a new one from the 16. This will be handy for SN—when BC table space is at a premium, we can switch to smaller tableaux as events fence down from their original four or eight pages.

During the turn of the Division I Men’s Saber, we discovered a fairly serious bug in FencingTime (which was also a perfect illustration of why we prefer to post the pool results and the DE tableau separately). James Williams came to the BC table to complain that even though he’d won all his pool bouts, his win percentage showed on the round results as .83. It turned out that there had been a medical withdrawal from the pool before it was completed, which means that all of that fencer’s bouts are thrown out. FT did that, but when it calculated the pool results, it still figured it was a pool of 7 instead of 6. Not only was James’s win percentage wrong, but so was that of everyone in the pool except the poor guy with no wins. Dan and Joe figured out a workaround for the problem, so we could continue the event—there was only about half an hour’s delay dealing with it—and Dan added it to the ever-lengthening to-do list in his FT notebook.

The bug didn’t seem to do James any damage, though—he went on to take the gold medal. (We BC folk aren’t supposed to play favorites, but since James started fencing at the same club my daughters did, I can’t help but be pleased when he does so well.)

Late night, unfortunately. As is usually the case, the concession food we could get with our vouchers wasn’t nearly as good as what we’d had for lunch.

As I set up my own computer at the BC stage, a couple of A/V techs were just finishing setting up a speaker line for us, so we would be able to play the national anthem over the PA system. We’ve had an mp3 of the anthem on the tournament computers for years, but just holding the microphone to the computer’s speaker doesn’t work, so we’ve had to skip the anthem when there was no live singer. Inevitably, though, we never got to use the speaker line—the Portland local volunteers had arranged singers for every day of the tournament.

The folks out at registration discovered a small bug in FT— the first scan of the membership bar code brings up the fencer and a second scan checks the fencer in. Dan had apparently intended for the first scan to bring up the fencer name but had planned that the second step—checking the fencer in for that event—would be done with a mouse click on a screen checkbox. The double scan was far more convenient, so it was immediately reclassified as a feature.

The big advantage to the FT check-in function is that it’s a live check-in on the network, so that the current information is accessible from the computers within the venue. Once we reach close of registration, we don’t have to wait for the printed list of no-shows to be brought in from registration—we can print it directly right there at the stage. Even better, any club changes or other corrections made out at registration go directly into the database, so that we don’t have to wait for them to be entered into the computer before we can start the event.

Because of this new version of FT, though, we were all slower getting events started and running. The computer operators (even those who were familiar with earlier versions of FT) were working with unfamiliar screens, with a different order for setting event formats, and the printed pages looked different from what XSeed gave us. That’s one of the reasons January was picked for FT’s first full run—with only three events each day, any problems wouldn’t be likely to affect the overall schedule much, and we’d be able to adapt our work flow appropriately.

One major difference between XSeed and FT is that in XSeed, you set up the event format for all rounds at the beginning. FT asks you at the beginning of each round what the format for that round will be, which is great if you want the flexibility to suddenly opt for a second pool round or repechage or fencing out 16 to all places. For us, that’s an unnecessary opportunity for operator error—in a tournament like January’s, where the Division I events have a 75% promotion rate from the pools instead of the more common 80%, it’s all too easy for the computer operator to simply hit the default selection. It would not be (and was not, in fact, when it happened) a big problem in Portland, but could be disastrous at SN or one of the NACs with multiple age-levels of Veteran or Youth events. So Joe’s asked Dan for a configuration function, with which the computer lead could set all the formats in advance.

Another FT change from XSeed, which required us to change our process, is the ability to include the strip assignments on all the sheets we print. So instead of printing out all the pool sheets and then writing the strip numbers by hand, we give the strip assignments to the computer operator before printing. The only trick with this is, in events with lots of pools of 6 and 7, to be sure to distribute the uneven pools among the available strips so that the 7s have the option of double-stripping on adjacent strips once the 6s are finished.

So eventually—in better-than-average time—the pools went out, the pools came back, the DEs went out, the afternoon event started—and then we got to the really fun part of the day. We’d already had quite a few people come tell us how much more legible they thought the FT printouts were, but we hadn’t yet made public the next logical step.

Joe had created a QR code and sent it to me a couple of weeks earlier, and my immediate reaction was that we should tell people about what was coming right then. Calmer heads prevailed, though, with the idea that we should make sure it all worked right before we went public. So I’d satisfied myself with making the signs to post as soon as we were ready, and once in Portland waited all through Friday morning for Joe to give the word.

Once we were well into DEs and knew all the rounds were functioning the way they were supposed to, Joe gave the OK, and I grabbed the signs I’d copied the day before and posted them on the bulletin boards and around the BC table.

Finally!

Once the signs were posted, I sat and watched to see how people reacted to LIVE RESULTS! at a USA Fencing national tournament.

The reaction didn’t take long. Tanya even received three or four approving emails within the first few minutes after we went public.  We got positive responses all weekend, of course, and though it was difficult to tell because the venue was one of those rooms that never seemed crowded even when it was full, it looked as though a substantial percentage of fencers had realized they could find their strip assignments using their smartphones, so the bulletin boards never seemed quite as jammed as in the past. A few coaches and parents joked that it just wasn’t right that their at-home spouse knew how their kids placed before they did.

There was that one guy, though, who looked at the sign on the bulletin board, took out his iPhone, and proceeded to take pictures of the posted sheets. But we took pity and showed him he could find much more information without using the camera at all.

A great day for flying up to Portland—all too often, there's too much cloud cover for this view.

I expected this would be an interesting NAC—in every sense of that adjective!—and I was not disappointed in that expectation.

Even if there had been nothing else going on, I would have been disoriented for this NAC, just because I’m so used to needing to get up at 2:30 or 3:00 am to get to the airport in time for an early morning flight with at least one layover to get me to the venue early enough for setup. I always use the lack of real sleep and the time zone change to put myself into Tournament Time—that weird actual-time-doesn’t-matter state necessary for running national events. A lunch-time flight in my home time zone with no layover just doesn’t seem like a real fencing trip.

My daughter got the real fencing travel this time—she had a layover at O’Hare, and the hour her plane sat sitting through two gate changes before it could unload made her miss her connection. But she was first on the standby list for the next flight, so even with the delay, she still made it to Portland in plenty of time for dinner.

Setup for me was relatively painless—all the scoring boxes were set up in plenty of time to get the strip numbers up on Thursday, and everything—bulletin boards, copier, all our supplies—were in place fairly early on.

The process was a bit more involved on the computer side, because this was a momentous NAC for us: since the contract with Dan was signed last summer, FencingTime had met all the intermediate tests, so Portland would be the first national tournament where we would be running FencingTime. While we had XSeed available to open up as a backup if it turned out to be necessary, we would not be using it to shadow FencingTime in real time.

So the little netbooks we use for check-in had to have the new software installed, as did the tournament laptops, and Joe had to make sure the server was configured and the network set up properly. And, as always, Carla and Tanya had to find and correct problems with the event seeding, especially in the Division I events, with their more complicated seeding rules. All in all, though, considering the amount of work we had to do, our 7:00 pm setup finish time was pretty good, and we were as ready as we could expect to be for dealing with whatever glitches and bugs and workflow changes we’d face in the morning.

Of course, that morning would come awfully early—because of the new check-in process with FencingTime, we—Tanya, me, Joe, and the rest of the morning computer staff, would need to be at the venue by 6:50 am. So we arranged to meet for breakfast at 6:00, so we could catch the train early enough to be at the convention center in time.

I’ve decided it’s quite a precise phrase, though. At Apple, at NeXT, at Pixar, Steve Jobs was by most accounts incredibly difficult to work for, but in a way that made people want to make products that met what were, compared to those of typical corporate leaders, insanely perfectionist standards.

That drive to achieve his vision, to drive everyone to make whatever it was better, to make it better than they could even imagine, resulted in some insanely great products—”cartoons” that are great films, phones and computers that remain pleasures to use long after their novelty wears off (if it ever does).

One could wish, hoping for a better world, that exacting drive on more executives in all fields, except that in those without a focused and inspiring vision like that of Steve Jobs, we wouldn’t get insanely great—we’d just end up with a bunch of megalomaniac martinets who were merely insane.

“Insanely great” is not an easy standard to pull off, and Steve Jobs did it routinely.

Actually, the PET wasn’t so little, physically, at least. It was larger than a typewriter, a large angular metal case with a teensy calculator-style “Chiclet” keyboard and a small monochrome CRT. It ran on the MOS 6502 processor, had 8K of memory, and data storage was on magnetic tape via the built-in cassette recorder.

The PET taught me fatalism: I would spend an hour or two painstakingly typing in a BASIC program and then hold my breath when I told it to “Save” and waited several minutes while the cassette recorded to see if this time I’d get to see the program work instead of the error message that told me I had to start all over from the beginning. (The poor thing couldn’t handle incremental saves.) If I was lucky, I’d get to see my program run; more likely, it would start and then run into a typo, which I’d have to find and avoid reproducing the next time I typed the program in.

After a few months of this, I upgraded to an Atari 800, which had a real keyboard, real RAM, and hooked up to my color TV. It was even capable of word processing, though in that funny non-proportional dot-matrix font without ascenders or descenders that was common on computers back then. This was a much more fun toy—there were games like Pong and Space Invaders and eventually Centipede, and there was enough memory (48K) to do slightly more complex programming (though I have no memory at all of any of the programs I wrote).

A few months after I got the Atari, I started working at the flagship store of a local department store chain as the manager of their new (and all shiny black with red neon) personal computer department. We carried the Mattel video game system (which we didn’t sell many of—it was pretty dated by then, and not that good to start with), the Atari 400 and 800 (along with their spiffy printer, which had two on/off switches because they thought the local/online switch would confuse consumers too much), and, of course, the Apple II. I wasn’t particularly impressed with the Apple II; the Apple IIe that was released after my first Christmas at the store seemed a big improvement, though I still wasn’t tempted to replace my Atari.

Unlike the other computer manufacturers whose products we carried, Apple Computer had sales reps who visited retail outlets, to see how we were doing and to provide advice and training and news. Steve Palmer soon became a favorite visitor, especially in the late fall of 1983. Apple had a new computer coming, he said, completely unlike the clunky Apple III or Lisa. He couldn’t tell us anything about it, he said, but he added, “I guarantee you’ll have one yourself in two months. I guarantee it.”

He was right, of course. In early January 1984, I drove down to San Francisco with my counterpart from our Fresno store, and met the chain’s electronic buyer at the Hyatt Regency for the big dealer announcement of the mysterious new Apple computer. After we signed our non-disclosure agreements, we were given information packets, with pictures and descriptions of the new Macintosh, which would be released within a few weeks. Several hundred of us sat in the huge ballroom, where songs from Thriller blared, and eventually we got an interesting—though not terribly exciting—slide presentation, along with the famous ad that would be shown during the SuperBowl. Unfortunately, Steve Jobs did the presentation at the East Coast gathering—we on the West Coast got John Sculley.

After the slideshow, though, things changed completely. After the slideshow came the hands-on breakout sessions, and as we walked into the classroom we each made a weird little “ooh” sound—the Macintosh was smaller than we’d expected. It was weirdly cute.

And it was amazing. It had those real typefaces, black on white, and was incredibly easy to use. We got to play with MacPaint, the drawing program unlike anything seen before on what were then still called microcomputers, and learned to cut and paste text in MacWrite, which seemed almost magical, reminding of the years in grade school when I’d wished for a machine that would make writing error-free essays easier than my penmanship did.

Later that day, we learned about what they called the Own-A-Mac program. On the theory that sales people who knew how to use their computers would be better at selling them, Apple offered us the opportunity to buy the $2495 Macintosh, its $595 printer, and a carrying bag for $1055. Not only that, but participants would be enrolled in a program which allowed us to purchase software at steep discounts (a minimum of 60%, as I recall) from manufactures like Microsoft, Lotus, Electronic Arts, and many others.

I bought one, of course, just like Steve Palmer had told me I would, and I’ve been upgrading ever since, to the point that I’ve lost track of how many Macs we’ve had. They’ve not all been magical machines like that first one, the kind of gadget that is simply satisfying to use. Some were merely okay, but an astonishing number from the years after Steve Jobs returned to Apple simply made me happy to work with—clearly I was in the demographic his design sense targeted.

My Pismo PowerBook, and my little aluminum 12″ were among my favorites, at least until my current PowerBook Pro/iPad/iPhone gadget combo. It’s silly, but I often use all three devices at once—working on a document on my laptop while I refer to a pdf on the iPad and use the calculator on my iPhone.

I can use Windows machines, too, of course, but I have to think about them too much to be happy using them. Despite my early adopter years playing with the PET and the Atari, I’m into computers not for the geek, but for what I can do with them—write and edit and calculate—and Steve Jobs’ machines suit the way I work better than any other tools I’ve ever used.

So tonight, after I heard the news, I just had to go upstairs and pull my original Mac out from the closet where it’s sat for years and take a look at it:

that old logo

The bag seemed so cool, but I don't think I ever used it more than once or twice.

Pocket for the keyboard, pocket for the cables (and the external drive, which I don't have any longer), and a pocket on the inside of the bag top for the mouse.

Pre-USB connections

I'd completely forgotten you used to have to screw cables in to attach them securely.

That keyboard was one of the nicest I ever used—at the time. Tonight it felt heavy and clunky. And I'm so much a trackpad person these days, I almost forgot to plug the mouse in.

So, all set up and plugged in, and I can’t even remember clearly what the start-up screen is supposed to look like. I upgraded this machine with more memory and a faster processor, so it’s functionally equivalent to a MacPlus.

At least, it used to be:

Oh, well. It's eight months older than my older daughter, and she just turned 27.

But that’s okay—I’m happy with what I can do with my current crop of Apple devices. I hope Apple will be able to keep it up for a couple more decades, too.

But one of these days, I think maybe I’ll dig up a Torx driver so I can open the old Mac up and see the names molded on the inside. As much as that crew believed they did something amazing, they had no idea what they started. Without Steve Jobs, it would never have happened.

(Oh, and my DOS/MS-DOS/Windows dad now owns not only his old white iPod, but an iPhone 4 and an iPad.)

It’s time to celebrate reading and the First Amendment and subversive ideas all at once: Banned Books Week (September 24−October 1, 2011) starts tomorrow.

You can find web badges and a lovely brochure listing this year’s banned or challenged titles (many of them mystifying) at the Downloads page of the ALA Banned Books Week site.

Some of my favorite books are perennials on those lists.

USFA work? Not so much.

It’s not that I don’t want to get started on the new season—it’s just that the work I do with USFA never really stopped, what with the tournament summit meeting in Colorado Springs in August (we’ve still to see what will come of that), figuring out BC staffing for the new season, creating a committee to create a formal structure for BC recruiting and development, proofreading the latest version of the Athlete Handbook, and other fencing and TC odds and ends.

What I’m getting back to work on now is my poor neglected Emmy and the mystery novel she’s the protagonist of. I wrote the first draft almost two years ago, but when I started as chair of the TC, I deliberately put off further work on the book for about a year, while I figured out what the TC was all about.

Now I’m getting back to work. Since I wrote the original draft in late 2009, I’ve read through it several times, making corrections and tweaking a few scenes here and there, but haven’t really looked at how the overall story works. Over the Labor Day weekend, I put the current draft into the newest version of Scrivener, the writing software I (and apparently many, many other writers) use, and split it down into scenes.

Two things happened once the manuscript was there in all its constituent parts in Scrivener. First, I was once again utterly entranced with Scrivener: it’s so good at what I need it to do that I just do what I want to do with the story, without worrying about finding the right macro or the command buried four or five menu levels down from where it ought to be (something I always seemed to be doing when I used Word).

Second, I discovered what a huge load of work I have yet to do before anybody else gets to read it. After I broke the book up into its scenes, I went through the whole story, writing up synopses for each scene, and discovered that doing so makes the weaknesses completely obvious. When I couldn’t describe what happens or what a scene is for (character development or a transition, say), I saw immediately that something needed fixing.

Scrivener lets you make all sorts of notes and comments, which is wonderful for keeping track of what needs doing at any specific point, and it lets you take multiple snapshots of the whole or pieces, so you can change things radically and still be able to revert to any previous version if the changes don’t work.  It also lets you look at scene synopses as index cards which you can rearrange. And when you rearrange the cards, you’ve also rearranged your manuscript to match, without cutting and pasting or juggling multiple windows.

So I’ll be spending most of this month and next happily reworking this story. Then after I spew out a first draft of the next book (same protagonist—there’s so much potential for homicide in the fencing world) in November for NaNoWriMo, I’ll reread the reworked version of this one to see if it’s ready for a few outside readers.

And through it all, I’ll probably drive my husband nuts babbling about how cool Scrivener is and how much easier it makes my writing process. (I can see it already—multiple dinner conversations about whether I love using Scrivener more than he loves using Rhino, the 3D design software he uses and frequently enthuses about.)

Ian Serotkin, explaining in post #49 why he likes refereeing at national tournaments, outlines the basic reasoning in favor:

I enjoy doing something difficult, well.

I enjoy giving back to the sport of fencing, which has given me a great deal in terms of personal development, character building, and physical & mental strengthening for the past 17 years.

I enjoy sharing this experience with my good refereeing friends, who share a singular dedication and camaraderie that is hard to match.

I enjoy visiting cities that I would have little reason to otherwise visit.

I enjoy being involved in extremely high level matches that I only could have hoped to reach as a competitor in my wildest dreams.

In my own case, it was better both for my kids and for me that I had something useful to do at tournaments, so I was happy to help out on the computers at that first JOs I worked in Sacramento in 2000. Once I started working national tournaments regularly, I was well and truly hooked on one of the more obscure hobbies in the country. Running individual and team events—and then whole tournaments—was incredibly challenging and satisfying.

I developed a whole new category of friends I see regularly at tournaments, and look forward to seeing them again wherever the next tournament takes us. Some of the best times in my life have been spent listening to stories at lunch in the officials’ lounge (I can’t remember all the details of Brendan Baby’s tale of Wes Glon testing some poor innocent’s worthiness to fence saber, but I remember how hard we all laughed) or in whatever that venue’s Official Officials’ Bar was. And there was the noisy little flight from O’Hare to South Bend one January that was at least 75% fencing people—I always felt sorry for that poor 25% who had no clue what the party was all about.

It’s been a hoot to see fencers I knew first in the Y1os or Y12s head off to NCAA teams (or the Olympics!) and others become ferociously competitive again once they age into Veteran events. I’ve seen fencers transform themselves from bratty whiny kids into impressively competent and personable young adults (and I’ve seen others retain their original annoying personalities well past the age they should know better).

I love running fencing tournaments.

But I don’t know that I can continue. I’ve promised myself and others that I will stick with it through the end of this Olympic quadrennial, but beyond that is an open question. Like many other national tournament officials, I’m ready to say, “Enough.”

Some of the fencing.net posters postulate single causes for referees to opt out of working SN:

• the delayed compensation, or
• the minimal amount of the compensation, or
• the abuse from fencers, coaches, and parents, or
• the long hours, or
• the often less-than-wonderful food (especially what can be had with those late-night meal tickets

The problem is not that simple, though. Nobody volunteers as an official for the money. Sure there are some referees, particularly some of the younger ones, for whom the delayed payments all last season was a serious issue, but nobody expects to make big bucks as a tournament official.

Getting screamed at by coaches and parents every so often comes with the job, too. The vast majority are fine—usually—but that people sometimes get mad and behave badly is only to be expected.

Nobody—well, at least not anybody who thinks about it for more than a few seconds—expects USFA tournaments to run on the same hours as world cups. Two or three thousand fencers in 12 or 18 or 24 events over four days (or nearly 6,500 fencers in 89 events over 10 days, as in Reno) naturally require longer hours and busier days than the two-events-each-spread-over-two-days schedule common to FIE world cups and championships.

Hotel and convention center food is what it is (all too often deep-fried). But there are often good restaurants around that surprise us (though we know the per diem probably won’t cover the price of the evening meal). But getting together with the gang is usually more important than the food.

The negative aspects eventually accumulate to the point that they overwhelm the many reasons for working national tournaments. The Atlanta 2010 Summer Nationals was a tipping point that way for many officials. All the problems combined synergistically to create an event that was no longer satisfying, no longer challenging, no longer fun.  It had become merely an ordeal to get through.

My tipping point was more gradual: the past season as a whole. Normally, I get twitchy if I don’t get to a tournament often enough. Two or three seasons ago, I was only scheduled to work a couple of tournaments after a year of working four or five, and I missed my fencing community. I look forward to national tournaments with great pleasure, despite the occasional horrible ones, like the 2006 Atlanta SN or Austin in 2003. We never plan on tournaments being horrible.

This past season I still looked forward to tournaments as usual—until the instant I fastened my seatbelt on the plane and suddenly thought, “Wait a minute! I just did this last month and it wasn’t fun.” Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Dallas, and Dallas were all like SN or worse, in the numbers of entries, in the long hours, in the punishing conditions that made it impossible to do as good a job as I knew I was capable of, that demanded the clearest thinking when I was most battered, that left me too tired to even feel relief at the end.

Those of us who volunteer for the satisfaction of doing our jobs well, for the fun and the community, no longer receive those rewards. Under the current conditions, we cannot do the job well, the community becomes almost non-existent, and fun is so rare that it startles, as it startled me on my Sunday off in Reno.

At this stage, deciding to quit working as an official is more a rediscovery of sanity than a conscious decision. We have to be lunatics to volunteer in the first place, but we’re not insane enough to keep at it forever.

This week I’m looking at drafts of the day schedules for next season (which look to be even more difficult than last season’s) and at the early returns (usually the majority by now, but this year so far only a sprinkling) to my request for availability to BC staff. We’re already potentially losing two or three experienced BC people through normal attrition (job and family changes), more than the newbies we’ve got coming in. I wonder whether I will even be able to staff national tournaments this season—are enough of us still crazy enough to stick it out through 2012 in hopes of the situation changing for the next Olympic quad?