Being Unreliable

Monday, I mentioned that our Monday game was shifting to a confusing and complicated schedule -- the upshot of this complication was supposed to be that we were playing mostly on Thursdays, except that one of the reliable members of the group (Ed, playing April at the moment) couldn't be there every Thursday. It wasn't until the next day that I realized that I *already*, in theory, had a game on Thursdays, and should have objected on those grounds.

The thing is, S, who hasn't been reliable lately, really wanted to move to Thursdays because Mondays weren't working out for her or her brother... maybe he could un-drop-out if we switched, even. On the other hand, there was no good reason that she couldn't make Mondays, she just had one one-time excuse after another -- this week it was her mother's birthday, next week she was waiting on some documents she had to sign for, and so on.

So I was sitting there, trying to decide whether to tell the Monday group that it had to stay Mondays, or tell the Thursday people that I was dropping out, and I decided to ask the Monday group what they thought I should do.

This was a bad idea.

After a lot of e-mail drama (mostly self-pity and 'don't do anything on *my* account' from three different people, including me), S admitted that the real reason she wasn't coming was because she's been driving without proper glasses, while legally blind, without insurance, and didn't feel comfortable driving at night -- and lately, all our games are 'at night', thanks to daylight savings and the latitude.

And I still don't know what to do.

Fooz

To keep us from doing anything productive today, we had a little foozball tournament for our team in the copy room. The foozball table was moved there because it was too noisy -- and as a side benefit, the only room it's still noisy for is a conference room, which can fix the problem by closing the door. Previously, the people who used that conference room never bothered to close the door, figuring the entire quarter of the building wanted to hear their chitchat -- so it's a twofer!

Anyway, we had a little double-elimination tournament with non-randomly selected teams. The intention was to pair people who had some experience with poeple who didn't play much, except that there were (apparently) more people who didn't play much than people who were good, so I ended up on a team with our PGM, who'd never played at all.

I'm not good at foozball. Natasha is much better at foozball than I am, and she ended up on the team with Joe, who turned out to be one of the best people overall. When the NatashaP/JoeJo team reached the finals undefeated, just about everyone made the observation that Natasha was the one who'd selected the teams...

They didn't win the tournament, though -- Jessica and Phil managed to beat them twice in a row to snatch victory from the jaws of the loser bracket.

The games my team played were kind of... disheartening, though -- we went up against the two top ranked teams, and lost 5-0, 5-1. The only goal I scored was on myself, playing goalie. >.