Papers, papers, papers.

Today was the first novice home meet. It started pretty late (11am) and got done around 7pm. In the Debate world, that isn't too bad. At home meets, we have to work if we are not debating, I had to work because I'm not a novice. Working isn't too hard, unless they put you in the wrong place with the wrong people at the wrong time. As you might know, I'm a Leo, and I can't deal with people infringing on my domain. However, I just had to suck it up and just deal with it today which isn't something that I normally do.

So I left my house at 10:45 and got there at 11, that isn't too bad because the traffic was light, and we weren't started 'till late anyway.  Because I'm a varsity member, I take it into my own hands to great everyone but some of the novices that I dont' know don't want to say "Hi" back to me, or answer my question of "Do you need any help?" I think that I should get to know all of these kids before the end of the year when they say "Hey, that girl is part of our team? I never seen her around before." I should probably say that the world of Speech and Debate is a dog eat dog world, and if you don't want to get eaten, you have to do what you can to make it out ok.

I got my ballot and judged a novice LD round, and although one kid didn't have his case, he did a really good job attacking everything that this opponent said. His opponent, did have a case, but he did a crazy good job with evidence. I gave them a little extra prep time than I normally would because I felt like being nice to them.  I thus went into the cafeteria and got a slice of pizza (Cheese, because they don't order vegetarian. My school never does) and a smoothie that I got a discount on because I know the people who make them.  I then sat at the ballot table and started to "run" ballots to the Tab room (where they put the ballots into folders and make sure that everything is ok with them). I did this for about 30 minutes until they said that I needed to stay to "help them out".

I got into the tab room and my coach said:  "you take the ballots, you look at the code on the corner of the ballot, put the ballot into the folder with the correct school code. The Aff team/person gets the white sheet, the Neg team/person gets the yellow paper. Pink papers go into the recycle bin". That didn't sound too hard. I got the ballots, tore the first two papers off, and put the pinks in the recycle bin. I got through the first 40 or so papers like that, but once the other ones came in, I had to up my game. I say that I could get the staples off 100 papers, sort them and put them in the right folder in about 2 minutes. Yes, I'm a fast worker.

That reminds me, I never really told you how many papers I was filling. Here is a math equation in case you are visual person:

Speech Events
4 people in a round x 7 rounds in a wave x 3 rounds total = 84 ballots per event.

84 papers per event x 6 Speech events = 504 speech event ballots total.

Debate Events
2 debaters per debate x AT LEAST 6 debates in a wave x 2 per wave (double wave = 7 debate at once, then 7 more) x 3 rounds = 72 papers for the debate types.

72 x 3 debate types = 216 debate papers total.

504 + 216+ 100 for 2 congress houses= 820 papers to be filed.

That is just a rough estimate. I know that there was a range of 600 ~ 1,000 balots that I filed today in a really fast 1:30 minutes. No paper cuts on my hands. But those god darn coaches got in the way of my filing, and they wanted to "just look at the ballots. I held every ballot of a judge that took 3 minutes looking at ballots till the end of my filing because they were getting in my way. I forgot to say that the table was round. You know what happens when you block one side of a table right?  I'm not rude, don't get me wrong, but when you are asking me to "see your folder" I'm going to snatch the paper from you and say "File it yourself. I think you know where your file is, and you can put the ballot that I put ON TOP for YOU inside your folder."  This is the only thing that I hate about volunteering, how rude people get and how much they ask you to do when they can see that you are doing something very important.

At awards, everyone else got a "thank you" except for me, (unless I was the judges table).  I didn't really care. I can just say, that the next time I'm working this, I'm setting some boundaries down, so I can have this done and taken care of.