Through 2023 I have mainly played bridge with people from the Northeast in the Hartford Bridge Club (HBC) and the Simsbury Bridge Club (SBC) in Connecticut and at tournaments. There were two sets of exceptions: the two bridge cruises that Sue and I took and a few occasions in which I picked up a partner at a club game when I was on the road for business or some other purpose. Only eight out of my 144 partners through 2023 fit in these categories.
Club games: I have included one game in Northampton, MA. The other two locations were in Charlotte, NC, and the Tampa Bay area.
Dave Wroblewski was the father of Denise Podavini (introduced here). He lived in Charlotte, NC, which was the location of the headquarters of Belk stores, one of TSI’s most important users of the AdDept and AxN systems throughout the twenty-first century. Denise was TSI’s primary contact at Belk from her arrival in 2008 until the dissolution of TSI in 2014 (described here).
I learned from Denise that her family was from Massachusetts and that her father was an avid bridge player. Denise was not even slightly interested in the game, but her father was attempting to teach her daughter1 how to play. When he heart that I had become a Life Master he invited me (through Denise) to play with him at the Charlotte Bridge Club one evening when I was in town consulting and gathering specs. This probably occurred in 2010, but it may have been a little later.
Dave and I had a nondescript game together. I am sure that I made a few mistakes. In those days my assessment of my abilities was somewhat inflated.
David was still a member of the ACBL at the end of 2023. He did not receive any masterpoints in 2023, which struck me as peculiar. He needed less than 27 masterpoints to reach the Diamond Life Master level of 5,000. I had to wonder if something happened to him to prevent him from playing.
It occurred to me while writing this section that my wife Sue has played with Ann Wroblewski, who lived in South Deerfield, MA. I had to wonder if her husband John was related to Dave. The name is not that common.
A year or two before the pandemic my friend Judy Hyde was trying to promote the novice game in the Northampton Bridge Club.3 She invited me to come up and play in the Pro-Am game at a room at the Methodist Church in NoHo. It was a long drive, and Wednesday was the worst possible day for me The time of the game (1pm) conflicted with the morning game at the HBC. It did not directly conflict with the evening game in Simsbury, but working out how best to get from Noho to Eno Hall and to eat supper by 6:30 would not be easy.
On the other hand, I wanted to help Judy get the game established, and so I agreed to play with Susan Lantz
It appears that playing one round with me did not inspire her much. She stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2022, at which point she had only 26.71 masterpoints.
My wife Sue’s parents moved to Clearwater, FL, in 1982. In the subsequent years Sue and I went down to visit with them on several occasions. Occasionally Sue and I visited one of the local bridge clubs for a game. They found appropriate partners for both of us.
The Clearwater Bridge Club4 played on the second floor of the Regions Bank building. They still were playing there at the end of 2023. Occasionally local residents Eric Rodwell and his wife have been known to attend games. The one time that I played there I was paired up with Dr. Mark Goldschmidt, a retired pediatrician who was a very good player.
My recollection is that we had a pretty good session, but we did not win. In 2023 Mark was still active in bridge. He had about 1,700 masterpoints.
The other club near Clearwater is the St. Petersburg Bridge Club, which is actually in a shopping center in Panellas Park, FL. I can only remember going to this club once, but my list of partners lists two from this club, Marvin Kistler of Kenneth City, FL, and Chris Person from Tampa. Both of them were still members of the ACBL in 2023, but Marvin had earned no masterpoints all year.
I have one fairly vivid memory of playing at this club. I think that I was playing with Chris, but I could be mistaken. On a hand in one of the very first rounds we were playing against one of my partners from Connecticut, Michael Varhalamas (introduced here). Chris opened 1♣, and the opponent to my right passed. I had a very weak hand with shortness in clubs. I passed, and so did Michael. Chris had to play in 1♣ with less than half the points and less than half the trumps. We received a very bad score.
I asked Michael if he would have bid with my hand. He said that he would have because opener could have as few as three clubs. He said that if he had opened any other suit. I have remembered that advice, but I am not sure that it is the right choice in all circumstances.
Sue has much more vivid memories of this club than I do. She was there when someone drove their car through the flimsy wall and stopped just short of where Sue was sitting. Mark Smith was directing that day. He ran up to Sue and helped her out of the “death seat”. He claims that he saved her life, but Sue remembers it a little differently.
The St. Pete club is still operational in the same building in 2023. Its website is here.
Sue and I took two bridge cruises together. Both of them featured Larry Cohen. The first one was in 2012, right after Sue and I got married. I have recorded the details here. We have often referred to it as the “Honeymoon for One. ” The sordid tale has been posted here.
One of the tournament staff was assigned the job of assuring that everyone had a reasonably appropriate partner. I was originally assigned to play with a lady, but she dumped me before the first hand. Instead my partner for the entire cruise was Frank Evangelista from Boca Raton, FL.
I really liked Frank, and I communicated with him a few times in the years following the cruise. Frank stopped paying dues to the ACBL in 2021. I could not find an obituary or any other clear reference to him on the Internet.
The other cruise was two years later. It was longer and had a much better offering of excursions. My journal of the trip has been posted here. My partner for this one was Marty Singer, who had houses in both New Jersey and West Palm Beach, FL. We intended to play together at an event that was proximate to both of us, but it never happened. He is still playing regularly at national and regional events.
On December 24, 2014, Marty was not available to play. I was paired up with Jacques Sopkin of Newport Beach,CA. The journal page for that experience is here. Jacques died at the age of 91. His obituary is here. His LinkedIn page is still available here. For “experience” only “007” is listed.
1. I never met her, but I think that this must be Katie Podavini, who was still an ACBL member at the end of 2023. She only had 37.71 masterpoints and none in 2083. It is incredible to me that so many people were still paying dues in 2023 but not playing at all.
2. The Charlotte Bridge Club appears to have survived the pandemic. Its home page is here. On the day that I wrote this entry (12/16/23) the club was holding a “Christmas/Holiday” party.
3. The Northampton Bridge Club was struggling in 2023. Their Tuesday night game was taken online during the Pandemic, and it never returned to face-to-face play. Judy’s Wednesday game persisted in 2023, and they sometimes had special games at Amherst. The club’s website can be found here.
4. The Clearwater Bridge Club was running seven in-house games per week and two Swiss events per month at the end of 2023. They were still playing in the bank. The website is here.
Documentation: I found a folder that contained a large number of documents concerning the attempt to sell the company. Some of them were in legalese, and some were very long. In most cases when they were germane to the story, I have included links to pdf files posted on Wavada.org.
I did not find any emails or notes about meetings. I have therefore needed to rely on my memory, which never had infallibility attributed to it at the First Vatican Council or anywhere else.
The plan: I had often thought about selling TSI, but I could never visualize how it could happen. In 2005 my partner Denise Bessette (introduced here) mentioned in one of our private meetings that she was interested in trying something different, perhaps in academia. We decided to investigate the possibility of selling the business. We were by no means desperate to do so. We were both earning six-figure salaries in those days. So, we were not going to forgo them unless the money was good. Also, we had a substantial backlog of profitable approved projects, and a new product, AxN, that was doing better than we had expected.
We agreed on two primary criteria for any sale. Denise would not be an employee of the new company after she sold her shares. Since I could not imagine why anyone would want TSI without both of us, the second criterion was that my role in the company after the purchase would be temporary.
From the outset I was skeptical of the likelihood of selling the company under those circumstances. It seemed to me that unless there were some demonstrable synergy between either AdDept or AxN and a prospective buyer’s product or service, I could not see the value of what would be left of TSI after both criteria were imposed.
I had informed my wife Sue, the other share-owner of TSI, that we were planning to explore selling it. When I told her that we hoped to get over $1 million for it, she was all for the idea.
Retaining a broker: Somehow we determined that it was necessary to engage a business broker to help us find a buyer. The fact that we had experienced very little success working with third parties other than IBM contributed to my pessimism. Nevertheless, I composed a very long letter that we sent to a few brokers who specialized in businesses like ours, or at least they did not specialize in much larger companies or vastly different industries. I do not remember where we obtained a list of appropriate brokers.
I have posted here a copy of the one that we sent to Steve Pope in March of 2007. He was not the first person to whom we mailed the letter. Here is a list of the brokers that we mailed to:
The first letter was sent to William Gunville2, the president of Successions, Inc., in East Weymouth, MA, on March 31, 2006. I found no evidence that he or anyone at his company responded.
The second letter, sent on the same day, went to Kerry Dustin3 of the Falls River Group in Naples, FL. There is no indication that he responded either, but the file does have TSI’s financial statement dated April 8 in three different formats.
On April 28 I mailed four letters. The first went to Merfeld and Schine, Inc., in Boston4. We must have had some subsequent communication with them. I have a copy of a blank agreement that someone at the company evidently sent to me in August.
I do not remember ever conversing with Matthew Lerner of Newport Acquisition Services5 of Columbia, MD.
No one from the Catalyst Group6 in Boston responded to the letter.
The last of the April letters went to the Corum Goup, Ltd.7 in the state of Washington. I remember one telephone call that might have been with someone from Corum. The gist of it was that even though we might have found a niche that provided the principals with comfortable incomes, that did not mean that anyone would be interested in buying the company. The man on the phone said that this was quite common. This, of course, confirmed what I had previously thought. This same person also said that the most likely company to be interested in purchasing us would be a competitor. The fact that we had no real competition was therefore a disadvantage!
On May 2 I sent a letter to Bob Capozzi of VR Business Brokers8 of Milford, CT. If he responded, I have no record of it. He might have told us that we were too small for his company. Several brokers told us that.
On March 31 of 2009 I mailed the same letter to Robert Meyers of Marshall Business Brokers in Bloomfield, CT. By that time we had worked with Steve Pope for two years. We must have felt that we could do better.
Steve Pope.
Of all the firms that we contacted Steve Pope was the only person who thought that he could help us sell the business. We met with him a couple of times and talked to him over the telephone quite often.
We signed an agreement with him that cost us $1,000 per month for two painful years. I have posted a copy of it here. Note that our asking price was $1.5 million.
Both Denise and I found Steve to be pretty easy to work with, and he provided us with a great deal of useful information. We did not know what we were doing when we started this process.
At the time his last name seemed an unbelievable coincidence. For the previous three years I had been researching the history of the papacy (detailed here) in hopes of getting my ideas about the popes published.
Someone & George Abraham.
The valuation: Steve insisted that we hire an outsider to undertake a professional valuation of TSI. He recommended a man named George Abraham9 and provided us with a write-up of his credentials and approach, which I have posted here.
We had to put together materials for him. Almost all of the information came from our general ledger. This cost us several thousand dollars and, in my opinion, was worse than worthless. It was obvious to me that he had just run information from our G/L through a software program that basically took the retained earnings and added the value of the fixed assets. Our fixed assets were minimal, and, as a closely held company, we had distributed nearly all of our profits at the end of every year. So, he concluded that our company was worth very little.
We considered the value of our company to be in its client list, the relationships that we had established with the clients, the strength of our staff, and the fact that the clients were totally dependent on us. None of this appeared in the valuation. When I complained about this, Mr. Abraham said that all of that was considered “good will”. He could increase it, but the first thing that any prospective buyer did with a valuation was to discard or at least disparage the portion that was attributable to good will.
I felt as helpless in this situation as I did when I had to fill out a “Request for Proposal” form designed by a consultant to use to assess potential software solutions. Those forms seldom allowed me to highlight the parts of our system that would help the prospective client the most. In the same way the valuation was going to be the first thing that a prospective buyer would see, and it did not allow us to highlight what was good about TSI.
Nibbles: TSI rented box #241 at the post office in Warehouse Point for communication that we might receive from Steve or from anyone else involved in the project. I went there every couple of days, take the junk mail out of it, and throw it in the recycle bin. I very seldom brought anything back to the office.10
I remember that a couple of times over the next few years Steve tried to connect us with people who might be interested, but nothing came of any of these exchanges.
I found four documents in which I answered questions about TSI’s approach. The first was a letter that I sent to Steve on January 31, 2008, about the alleged obsolescence of the AS/400, which by then had undergone a few name changes. I have posted it here.
I also have posted answers that I provided to many very detailed questions to people that I don’t remember named Peter, James, and Len. The first two were dated February 4, 2008. The last one was sent on March 14, 2008.
Denise and I were encouraged at first, but after a few months we began to hear less and less. Steve still called once in a while, but there were no prospects who could be considered even lukewarm.
Tim Finney.
The buyer: Steve told us in early 2010 that an “entrepreneur” from St. Louis who had bought and sold several companies was interested in buying our company. His name was Tim Finney.11
Denise and I had a conference call with him and Steve in early March. Evidently we did an abbreviated demo of our systems via Webex.12 I don’t remember the details, but I found a letter that Tim sent to us on March 15 (beware the Ides of March!) that provided a fairly detailed analysis of what he was willing to pay us for our stock in TSI. It has been posted here. The important features were:
The total purchase price was $1,000,000 for 100 percent of the stock.
We would need to pay capital gains taxes on this amount.
I would work for another two years at a salary of $95,000. He would have the option of extending this another two years if “Tim and Mike agree that the business can or can not sustain itself at that time based on Tim’s progress with the software code/business.” In any case Mike would work for two months for nothing.
Denise would work for two months for nothing.
We were very interested. On May 7 Tim sent us a confidentiality agreement, which Denise, Sue, and I signed and returned to him. The confidentiality agreement has been posted here.
Tim sent the Letter of Intent a few days later with the specification that the closing would be by July 15, or earlier if possible. I made it clear every time that I talked with anyone involved that I needed for this either to be completed before August or postponed until September. Sue and I had scheduled a trip for August 8 through August 21.
Tim made a trip to Connecticut in early June after the LOI had been signed. I discovered an outline of what I wanted to say to him. It is posted here. Denise and I met with him on a Saturday or a Sunday. I remember two things from that visit, which seemed to go very well. The first was that Tim said that he had purchase several companies, and had resold most of them. One that he was still holding was a software company, and he mentioned some sort of difficulty with it. The other memorable event was the surprising statement that he would have no difficulties with his banks. He claimed that he had great relationships with all of them. I only had two banks, and no one at either one had any idea who I was.
Both of these should have been red flags. I was already dreading needing to work for Tim for two or four years. If he already had trouble with other coders in a similar position, it might be even worse than I had imagined, and I already imagined myself being screamed at over the telephone on a regular basis,
His mention of the banks made it clear that he had not yet obtained the financing. I should definitely have called a halt to proceeding any further until he had lined up the money. It was a rookie mistake.
The office of Andros, Floyd & Miller in Hartford.
The lawyer: Back in April Denise and I could understand that we might be in over our heads. We asked our accountant, Tom Rathbun, if he knew of any lawyers that could help us in dealing with a prospective buyer for our business. He recommended that we contact Mark La Fontaine of the law firm of Andros, Floyd & Miller. We contacted him, and he sent us an engagement letter on April 5 that stated that his billing rate was $300 per hour. He waived the retainer fee.
Denise and I drove to his office one afternoon in April. We explained our situation to him. For some reason he was most concerned about Sue’s status with the company and the fact that she was part of our group health insurance. He strongly advised us to remove her from the group. I disagreed with his assessment. I was quite sure that I could defend our approach if someone accused us of fraud.
Mark explained the process of selling the company. I did not think that I got $300 worth of advice out of the meeting. I just had to hope that he would be worth the money when the exchange of paperwork got more intense. I am pretty sure that we provided Mark with a copy of the Letter of Intent. I don’t recall whether he had asked us if Tim had said in writing that he had lined up sources for the financing.
On May 20 Tim sent me forty-one “due diligence” questions. They are posted here. I wrote up answers, and Mark reviewed them. I then sent them to Tim together with the necessary attachments on May 24. The answers are posted here. Bring a lunch; it has eleven pages and several attachments that I did not post.
A second set of twenty-one questions came on May 28. They are posted here. My answers and supporting documentation was sent on June 2. They are posted here.
The third set of ten questions arrived on June 17. These, which were more personal than technical, are posted here. By this time I was getting very antsy about whether this process could be completed before Sue and I departed for our vacation in Russia. The file of answers has the same date and is posted here. Since all my answers were reviewed by Mark or his staff, one of the dates must be wrong.
I remember one after-hours telephone call that I had with Tim. I have always hated telephone calls, and I had been spending an inordinate amount of time writing up very detailed answers to his questions. He told me that I sounded like I had “seller’s remorse”. I explained that what he heard in my voice was my lifelong aversion to negotiating over the phone.
On Thursday, August 5, Tim finally sent to me and Mark the purchase agreement (here), promissory note (here), stock pledge (here), and employment agreement (here). I immediately called Mark’s office and left word that I was leaving for vacation on Sunday and would be back in the office on Monday, August 23. Nothing was to be done until they heard from me. I asked Denise to keep me apprised of any developments, but I warned her that I was not confident about how reliable my access to the Internet would be.
The documents were long and complicated. However, they appeared to my untrained eyes as pretty much in accord with the LOI. My obligation, which previously had consisted of a definite two-year commitment and another tentative two-year commitment had been changed to a definite three-year commitment.
Russia: For many months Sue and I had been planning to take a river cruise in August in Russia from St. Petersburg to Moscow (described in great detail here). Because the arrangements had been made in conjunction with our friends, Tom and Patti Corcoran, postponing the trip was never a serious consideration. I had put in a lot of effort to get the most out of the trip including spending a lot of time trying to remember the Russian that I had learned in the sixties. I even downloaded a set of flash cards for Russian vocabulary from the Internet. I used them for at least an hour per day.
I was very excited about the prospect of seeing both the major cities of Russia as well as a little bit of the vast territory between them. I was happy that the deal with Tim seemed to be nearing consummation, but I did not like the fact that I would be on a ship in Russia while the unsigned documents were in Hartford and St. Louis.
Viking Surkov is now known as Viking Helg.
On day #11 of the cruise, Thursday, August 19, our ship. the Viking Surkov, was docked on the northern edge of Moscow. I was scheduled to take a bus tour to Sergiev Posad, which had been outrageously described to us as the Vatican City of the Russian Orthodox Church. Before breakfast I had made my way to the center of the ship, where the Internet service was the closest to tolerable. My journal has only this brief description: “I had just enough time to download my e-mail messages. A couple of the work-related ones were rather disturbing, but there was not much that I could do about them.”
The disturbing messages were from Denise. Evidently Tim’s lawyers had been communicating with Mark about details of the agreement throughout my absence. That was disturbing enough, but Tim himself had contacted Denise and had told her that his bankers had been questioning some aspects of the deal. He wanted to rewrite the purchase agreement. I was astounded to learn that the bankers were still involved. I thought that surely he must have shown his plans to them before he sent them to the lawyers and then to us. What in the world was going on?
Tim’s new plan: I don’t have any documentation of the new plan that I had to deal with when I returned to work, but I am pretty sure that I remember it in some detail. He proposed to buy only Denise’s 25 percent of the shares immediately. Sue and I would still be majority owners. I would hire him as marketing director at a salary of $50,000 per year. In three years he would buy the remaining shares if we had met the sales objectives that we had outlined. They are posted here.
I considered this proposal laughable:
Sue and I received nothing.
Since the business was not being sold, Steve Pope received nothing except salary cuts.
He wanted me to let my most valuable employee go and voluntarily terminate a relationship that I had worked hard to cultivate.
My new partner would be someone with whom I was dreading working.
TSI’s new marketing director had no credentials and no ties to either of our target markets.
He wanted to set his own hours and work from home.
If (actually when) the plan failed, it was still my responsibility.
Sue would kill me if I agreed to this.
I tried to explain why this was a non-starter. I don’t think that Denise would have agreed anyway, but our agreement with her prohibited her from selling her shares privately.
I made one more trip to St. Louis to try to persuade him. Denise thought that it was a waste of time and money, and so I had to pay for it myself. Tim picked me up at the airport in his snazzy Lexus sports car and drove us to his house/office in Chesterfield, MO. I tried to resurrect his original proposal with every argument that I could think of. He listened to me politely and said that he would think about it, but I knew that the deal was dead.
I wrote a letter terminating our contract with Mark as soon as I returned. Here is the text:
Please terminate our contract immediately. At this point, it appears that the deal is beyond resuscitation. If this transaction is somehow revived, we may want to start anew.
Thank you for your assistance. It is a shame that so much effort was wasted on such a futile endeavor.
Explanation and Speculation: Here is what I think might have happened. The banker(s) were probably not impressed with his idea. However, they must not have rejected it out of hand because he was still willing to buy out Denise. So, he must have been able to lay his hands on $250,000. I think that they probably were asking him to put up his house or some other fixed asset as collateral for the rest of the money. Either this gave him cold feet, or perhaps his wife put her foot down. In either case I blame the feet.
Could this gigantic SNAFU been avoided? I think so. I should have insisted that Tim show the Letter of Intent to the bankers. He had allegedly already bought and sold companies. I assumed that he would have lined up financing first before telling someone that he wanted to give them $1 million. Like Fllounder in Animal House, I fucked up; I trusted him.
Would the original plan have worked? It would only have worked if Tim had been able to convince two or three large retailers to buy AdDept. At that point the only ones left who did not use AdDept and also did a lot of advertising were Walmart, Home Depot, Lowe’s. Dillard’s, and chains of grocery stores and drug stores. Maybe he could have pulled it off, but I cannot imagine how. Maybe he knew how to persuade them to let me talk with the advertising managers and then give a presentation, but I had seen no evidence of it.
At the same time we probably would have needed to pivot our development to use more attractive input and output. We also probably would have needed to come up with a way to handle Internet advertising in a useful manner. Both of these tasks would be daunting.
Even if we had succeeded, I think that my life would have been hell for three years. I was absolutely and completely honest in everything that I said to him, but there were certainly things that he did not understand. For example, I seriously doubt that he understood that the AxN revenue was dependent on the AdDept clients. When an AdDept client stopped using the system, was purchased or absorbed by another retailer, or outsourced the buying of its newspaper ads, all or at least a majority of the associated AxN revenue disappeared.
Denise, who was ten years younger than I was, wanted to sell because she desired to try something else. I had no such ambitions. I wanted to sell because I could not see a way to make the business continue to be viable without a huge expenditure of time and money.
I would have done everything that I could to make it succeed, including going back to working 70-hour weeks. It would have required a herculean effort to make the business work without Denise. Keep in mind that I had celebrated my sixty-second birthday on the ship in Russia. Whom could I hire to replace Denise? I could probably find someone with the experience and skill of the Denise whom we hired in 1984, but no one in the U.S. could just take her chair and do what she was doing in 2010 without a lot of on-the-job training. My rule of thumb was that new programmers generally cost me more time than they saved during the first six months of employment, and Denise meant much more to the company than any programmer.
I would not have taken any vacations during those three years. That means that I would have missed the South Italy tour in 2011 (described here), which was our last tragic adventure with Patti and Tom. In 2012 we took a Larry Cohen bridge cruise, the famous honeymoon for one (described here). I would never have met Frank Evangelista. In 2013 I spent a few days at the Gatlinburg Regional bridge tournament with Michael Dworetsky (describe here). A lot of pleasant memories would have never been created.
Worst of all, I think that Tim would have inevitably come to blame me for the company’s failure. I can imagine awkward and even painful telephone conversations on a weekly basis. I don’t know what he would have tried to make me do to fix the situation. You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. He might have sued me. I cannot imagine what the grounds would have been, but he probably had much deeper pockets for legal fees than I did. For a guy like me that would have been a real nightmare.
Expenses: Denise and I spent a lot of money, and I took on more than 75 percent of the cost. We spent $24,000 for Steve Pope’s activities. I don’t remember what the appraiser charged, but it was much more than $1,000. Mark charged us at least $12,800. The trip to St. Louis cost $500, and our dinner with Tim was nearly $150. So, the total charge was around $40,000. I also spent a great deal of time on this project, and at the time we were billing out my services at the rate of $1,000 per day.
This was not quite as bad as it looked. The expenses were deductible, and at the time I was paying a lot in taxes. Furthermore, if the effort had been successful, Sue and I would have received hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 2009 I invested a high percentage of my savings in an indexed fund based on the S&P 500. I would presumably have augmented that with an even higher percentage of the windfall. From that time through October of 2023 the S&P 500 has increased in value by approximately 300 percent! Do the math.
1. Steve Pope was still in the business brokerage business in 2023. His company was called Pope and Associates, LLC. The website is here.
10. For a short while I placed the most current TSI backup tape in the P.O. box. The clerk quickly put an end to that. He said that it was not allowed for the owner of the box to put anything in it. The owner could take things out or leave them in the box, but only post office employees could place anything in the box. I did not argue. I think they were worried about a bomb.
11. Tim Finney’s LinkedIn page lists his occupation as CEO and Founder. It is located here.
12. Webex is an Internet product from Cisco systems. It allowed people to view on their own systems what was being displayed on remote systems. This was, of course, before Zoom existed.
By the beginning of September of 2023 I had become quite frustrated about the time that I had been wasting because my Lenovo desktop computer, on which I had keyed in the great bulk of the entries in the 1948 Project (introduced here), was intolerably slow. The biggest problem was that the system would quite often lock up for as long as ten or fifteen minutes. During these periods the disk light was on continuously. I had tried to determine the cause by examining the output available in Windows’ Task Manager, but I had no luck. I had also asked the Greek Squad to look into it. The agent signed on to my system, deleted a lot of temporary files. That seemed to help for a day or two. However, it reverted to its previous behavior shortly thereafter.
Another problem was its connection with the Cox modem/router. The connection would be lost for no apparent reason, and it was often difficult to recover. A few years earlier I attached a modem that I had previously purchased to a USB port. That did not seem to help much
So, in desperation I decided to purchase a new box. I did some research on the Internet. The new systems seemed to have much faster processors than my Lenovo desktop. The hard drives were in most cases a little smaller, but that did not concern me much. The amount used on the Lenovo was far less than the capacity of any of the available machines.
I had had pretty good experiences during my last two computer difficulties (outlined here) with the Geek Squad people at the Best Buy store in Manchester, CT, which was about a thirty-minute drive from my house. I therefore decided to buy one there.
I cashed in the points on my Bank of America Mastercard for a Best Buy gift card in excess of $300. The units at Best Buy started at about $600 unless I was willing to settle for an obsolete model that ran Windows 10 or an “open box.” I decided to put a new system on order shortly after I received the gift card in the mail.
Unless I did not mind making several trips to the store, I figured that the easiest way was to order it online and pick it up at the store. Before I did so I had an electronic chat with one of Best Buys sales agents. I told him which model (an Asus) I was interested in, but I also expressed my concern about the difficulty of migrating the programs that I used. I specifically emphasized that the one that I was most worried about was Outlook, Microsoft’s email product. The agent assured me that the Geek Squad people at the store could help me with that. That convinced me to put the system on order. It was scheduled to be at the store on Friday, September 21. I actually received an email that it had arrived a day early. I had a big project to work on over the next few days, and so I planned on picking it up on Monday.
I had a long and strange electronic chat with agents from Best Buy on Friday. When I explained my concern about Outlook I was transferred to a different agent who allegedly specialized in this. A little later I was transferred again. This agent assured me that the Geek Squad would do the entire migration for me and made an appointment for me for 3:20 in the afternoon on Monday.
I left for Best Buy at 2:30 on Monday and arrived at 3. I had no trouble obtaining the new computer. I had brought with me a bag that contained the Lenovo that I had been using as well as a very old external hard drive for which I had lost the power cord. I intended to ask the Geek Squad people after they had migrated the programs and data if there was any way extract the files that were on the external drive onto something usable.
The Geek Squad guy was very friendly, but he said that they only did data, not programs. This was very upsetting to me. The only reason that I had purchased the machine from Best Buy was for the help that I expected to receive. Migrating the data was no challenge if you had a large external hard drive, and I did. I was so upset about the lies (or maybe misunderstandings) that I left Best Buy without remembering to ask about the hard drive. As I drove out of the parking lot I was so concerned about what should be my next step in making the system in my trunk operational that I almost ran a red light and caused a serious accident. The rest of the drive home was uneventful.
Plan Z: In my research I had come across a company name Zinstall (website here) that markets a downloadable program called WinWin that the website claimed was able to transfer all of one’s programs and files from any Windows computer to a new Windows 11 computer. It cost $129 plus tax.
On the evening of Wednesday September 272 I started an electronic chat with someone named Paul from Zinstall. He assured me that they installed software, called WinWin, that could transfer all the programs, but it was possible that Microsoft would demand proof of ownership in the form of a serial number or program key. A little more research convinced me that this was quite unlikely. Besides, I could not see an alternative. So, I purchased the software. I received the following email:
Thank you for choosing Zinstall.
A. DOWNLOAD LINKS 1. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the SOFTWARE: (link) 2. You should download and run the software on BOTH computers: OLD and NEW. 3. IMPORTANT: before taking any further steps, you should carefully read the USER GUIDE. CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK to download the user guide: (link)
B. ACTIVATION INFORMATION: Below is your Zinstall license activation key serial number. You will need to supply this information when prompted by the software. Serial number: WNPV-XXRR-BJDK-VJK6-USOP-I2XP-LGXO-6UEV-74 Registered email: Mike@Wavada.org
C. SUPPORT AND SERVICE We are glad to assist you with your transfer. 1. SUPPORT QUESTIONS & TROUBLESHOOTING: For any support questions or assistance, CLICK THE FOLLOWING LINK: (link) where you will find answers and solutions for your questions, as well as options to contact the Support Team. 2. If you require TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE, please submit the “Support Case Form” and run the Diagnostic Tool on both computers (old and new). Both the Form and the Diagnostic tool are available at the link above.
D. FULL SERVICE – REMOTE ASSISTANCE: IF you prefer the convenience of having an expert tech perform the whole transfer for you, you have the option of a Full Remote Service add-on. It is available here at a discounted “bundle” price: (link).
E. BEST PRACTICES: HOW TO PERFORM A MIGRATION? Before starting the migration process: 1. Make sure you have a backup of your computers. 2. Save all open files and close all running applications. 3. Completely uninstall all Internet Security Suites, Firewalls, and Antivirus on both computers – OLD and NEW. 4. You don’t need to purchase any special cables or external hardware to do the transfer. If your computers are connected to a home network, you don’t need to do anything – Zinstall will use the network for the transfer. Otherwise, you can just use a regular network (aka Ethernet) cable – you probably already have one – to connect the computers directly. Here is what it looks like: (link). 5. While wireless is usable as well, if you have an option to use Ethernet – use it. Wireless is inherently slower, and may be interrupted by network disconnects. 6. The migration process requires “Administrator” user privileges.
IMPORTANT: The transfer may continue for a very long time – DO NOT INTERRUPT the process, even if it seems that nothing is happening for a while. REMEMBER: Once started, the migration process is completed unattended – you are not required to stay near the computers, and may leave it for the night to complete.
One thing that had not previously been clear was that I needed to connect the two computers via an Ethernet cable if they were not already on a network. I thought that it would be sufficient that both used wi-fi. I had been planning on sending the data through the modem/router from Cox Cable.
I asked Sue if she knew if we had an Ethernet cable. She said that she had at one time put all of the miscellaneous cables in a big plastic tub. I naturally asked where it was. She said that she didn’t remember. I was not surprised. I made a mental note to drive to Target on Thursday morning to purchase one. Target’s website offered a seven-foot cable for $10, and they seemed to be in stock..
In one of my dreams that night, however, I had a revelation that there might be one in the north end of our basement near the AS/400 that I brought home in the summer of 2014 after we closed TSI’s office in East Windsor.
When I awakened in the morning I hastened downstairs and discovered that there were indeed two Ethernet cables in a snake’s nest of cables near the computer. I wrested one away and without too much difficulty I was able to connect the two black boxes on my desk. When the yellow lights appeared in the sockets for both, I rejoiced. I had saved $10!
The migration: The instructions sited above were thorough and instructive. As someone who wrote such instructions for users of his code for thirty-five years, I have one quibble. Users expect the written instructions to be in the order in which they are to be executed. In this document some of the most important pieces of information are near the end. I admit that I never read sections B, D, and E until I started writing this account on Friday.
I downloaded the WinWin software to my old system, Lenovo. I found the executable file in the Download folder and ran it. According to the instructions I should have run it as administrator, but I didn’t. The program churned for a few minutes and then asked me whether this was the old computer or the new one. After I selected “old” it told me to do the same thing on my new computer Asus.
I had planned to use the same display on both computers.3 So, at this point I needed to detach it from Lenovo and insert it into Asus. This turned out to be a much bigger pain than I thought that it would be. In the first place the lighting in that area of the office was not good.4 The head of the cable was held in place by two screws. No screw driver was needed, but it took longer than I remembered to screw and unscrew them with my fingers.
After I attached the display I turned on Asus for the first time. It came up rather quickly. Among other things it asked for a PIN. I used the same one that Sue and I use for the garage door opener. It invited me to take a tour of Windows 11, but I postponed that adventure until some undisclosed point in the future.
Instead I selected the Edge icon on the desktop, downloaded the WinWin executable again, found it in the Download folder, and ran it. The same window came up, and, when asked, I said that this was the new computer. The program then searched for the old computer. This was the moment of truth, or I should probably call it the first moment of truth.
It was not to be. The screen displayed a sad message (#324) that indicated that it could not find the old computer. The likely cause, it said, was either that the two boxes were not connected or that security software on one of the boxes was preventing the connection.
I checked the back of both computers. The Ethernet cables seemed to be securely attached. I then uncabled the display from Asus and reattached it to Lenovo. By coincidence almost as soon as I could see the display again a window appeared for the Webroot program that the Geek Squad had installed. It had options to end three types of security. I did so. Consequences be damned.
I then sent to the support team at Zinstall an email explaining the situation and identifying the error message number. I received two identical “high importance”messages one minute apart: “Hello Michael Wavada, This is an acknowledgment we have received your email. We will contact you soon. Best regards, Zinstall support team”
I would have preferred something more specific than the word “soon”, even if it was “within the next 24 hours”. I felt that Zinstall recognized the urgency of the problem, and I could expect an email with specific instructions within the next five minutes, or five hours, or maybe five days. I stayed at Lenovo’s keyboard4 and won game after game of two-suited Spider Solitaire while intermittently checking the Inbox in Outlook. At about noon I fixed myself a ham sandwich and ate it in front of my desk while I kept my eye on the Inbox.
I almost always took a nap after lunch. Mine on that day was a rather short one, and I rushed back to check the Inbox as soon as I was awake. No dice.
At 1:47PM I sent a short missive to Zinstall support: “How long is soon? It has now been over four hours.” Nearly an hour later I was about to send another email when this showed up in the Inbox. It was signed by Sam R.
Thank you for contacting us.
You have Webroot still active on the old computer.
Please disable Webroot firewall on the old computer (or simply remove Webroot from the old computer), and run Zinstall again on both.
Please let us know how we can assist further!
I replied as soon as I could: “I believe that I disabled it before running Zinstall. I tried to delete the folder named Webroot, and it said that I need permission from SYSTEM to do so. I do not know how to do that. Actually I seem to have two copies of Webroot. One in Program Files, and one in Program Files x(86). The Geek Squad installed them.”
Sam R. must have been horrified about what I had attempted. He wrote back rather quickly.:
You should not delete folders directly; instead, you can typically right click on the Webroot icon in system tray (bottom right corner, near the clock) and select “Shut down” or “Exit”.
Or, to uninstall it, go to the list of installed programs and select Webroot there.
Alternatively, if you cannot get rid of Webroot, another alternative is to use Zinstall with a USB external drive instead of network.
Do you happen to have a USB hard drive available?
I did have an external drive with a great deal of storage, and it was within two feet of my right hand. Nowhere in the emails or the online instructions booklet was there any mention of this option. Maybe that could be plan Z2 if we could not get past the security issue. In the process of disabling Webroot in the way that he described I noticed that the system clock was off by more than two hours. While I was in the same system tray I also found a Malware icon. There was no option to disable it. I select “Quit” instead. Both icons disappeared from the tray.
Uncertain whether Sam R. would still be working, at 5:04PM I sent the following message to describe what I had done since receiving his (her? their?) last email:
I tried this twice. On the first try I received the same message as before even though Webroot was not listed in the Apps. The second time I removed Webroot again (the system had rebooted on its own) and Malware Bytes from the Apps in the lower right corner. This time the program on the new box found the old box, but it warned that I was using a wireless connection that might be slow or fail. The lights for the Ethernet ports are on on both machines. Is there a way to verify the connection? I do not have a network (other than the Cox Cable modem/router). I just ran a cable between the machines.
Later I became convinced that Lenovo had not, in fact, rebooted on its own. I was pretty sure that the AC cable had been jostled loose while I was moving the display cable back and forth between the two boxes.
I decided to try it again, and I was cautiously optimistic. However, the email sent at 6PM told a different story: “It is now showing message #11. This is SO FRUSTRATING!” Message #11 said that my account had reached the limit on the number of tries. I did not receive an answer on Thursday.
I was poor company all evening. I was close to giving up on Zinstall, but I had no alternative at this point. I began to consider contacting American Express to tell them not to pay for the service. I went to bed at about 9PM, which was quite early for me.
On Friday morning I was pleasantly surprised to receive an email from Sam R. The time stamp was 4:14AM.
Thank you for the update, it’s great that the connection issue is solved now that Webroot is removed!
Regarding wireless, you do not have a huge amount of data on the old computer, so you can transfer via wireless as well.
As long as the wireless network is not abnormally slow, it will complete just as well.
Note also that you can use the old computer while the transfer is in progress, if needed – just press the Windows key on your keyboard to get to your apps / desktop.
Please let us know how we can assist further!
I asked him about error #11. He said that that had been cleared. I did not respond to his comment about being able to use the old computer. Once the process started, I intended to monitor it on the new computer. I had no intention of touching any of the cables once the migration was under way. He probably did not remember that I was switching the display from one machine to the other.
Before I ran the WinWin program on Lenovo I made certain that neither security program was in the system tray. When I moved the display’s cable, I was very careful not to jostle the AC cable on Lenovo. I then checked to see that both Ethernet lights were on.
At about 8:20 (I know because I always awaken Sue at 8:30) I initiated the WinWin program on Asus. This time it found Lenovo, and it did not present the warning message about using a wireless connection. It must have been using the Ethernet cable.
The process took about three hours. I used part of the time to go through the papers that had been accumulating on my desk for a few months. That was a worthwhile activity. I found a year-old credit from Costco for $1.48 and the paperwork for applying for a discount on the real estate tax levied by Enfield. I also found my hanging file for income tax for 2019. I had no idea why it was out of the filing cabinet.
I was very impressed with the window that displayed the various steps in which the program was engaged. It also showed two percentage bar graphs that indicated the portion of the step being executed and the total process that had been completed. At the bottom were statistics about things like the rate of data transfer and the size of the files that had been copied.
When it was finally finished, it congratulated me on a successful migration. I have seen many such messages before, but this was the first time that I really thought that we had accomplished something important together—I mean the program, the computers, the cabling, Sam R., and I.
I restarted the system as directed. It came back up rather quickly, and I entered the PIN. The desktop looked almost the same as it had before. The program tray was missing two icons. One was definitely for Spider Solitaire. I purchased a new copy for Asus, for $0, and it popped back up in the program tray. The other one might have been for a program that I had downloaded to convert YouTube videos to MP3 or MP4 files.
Outlook. etc.: It was time for the second moment of truth. With some trepidation I clicked on the blue Outlook icon. Microsoft somehow recognized me and asked me to key in the password associated with the account associated with my email address. I found it on my password list. Microsoft approved it and immediately installed updates to the software. I then needed to key in the passwords for my two email accounts. I got the Cox one on the first trick, but I made a mistake on the one for Wavada.org. Once I got it right all the emails that I had received from both accounts showed up after the next Send/Receive.
Everything seemed to be there, and I liked the new look and feel of the software.
Problems: After one day’s use I had encountered only three problems. As I mentioned, I had left one program open on Lenovo. It took me less than five minutes to bring the Asus version up to date. At one point while I was surfing in Firefox Windows11 interrupted and reported that it needed to restart. I had no choice but to let it. It came right back up, but I lost about an hour’s worth of work in WordPress. I don’t know why it had not been saved, but I will need to be more careful about updating these long blog entries more regularly.
The strangest problem was encountered using the editor of posts in WordPress in Firefox. Below is the screen for editing a blog entry in Chrome. This is also how it looked in Firefox on Windows 10:
Notice the blank area to the left of the text and the slide bar on the right that is now most of the way down the “Post” area on the right.
Contrast this with the same screen on Firefox.
The Firefox version shows a frame from the Dashboard on the left. The two slide bars are both so thin as to be effectively invisible to a septuagenarian. The one to the right of the text works correctly, but the one to the right of the Post column only raises and lowers the Dashboard on the far left, even though it is long enough to need a slide bar. Furthermore, it has no effect on the Post area. This makes it almost impossible to add more tags after a point.
I don’t know if this was a problem in Windows 11 or WordPress. I planned to install a new version of WordPress soon. I later learned that it was neither. The slide bars in Windows 11 were much smaller. Sometimes they were nearly invisible.
Performance: The new box is lightning fast, and so far it has never locked up.
1. The technical experts at law enforcement agencies on television often extract files from hard drives that survived plane crashes, arson, floods, and the like. Surely the agents of the internationally renowned Geek Squad had similar tools at their disposal.
2. I ordinarily played bridge on Wednesday evenings, but the game on 9/27 was canceled because only three pairs planned to intend.
3. Sue thought I might be able to use a gigantic display that she had squirreled away in the three-season porch. I was thoroughly skeptical even before I learned that it had no cable.
4. I did NOT need my cataracts removed. That will probably come some day, but not before my subsequent appointment with the retina specialist on October 18.
In 2023 the lights are always out at the Red Lion in Cromwell.
Presidential Regional: District 25, the New England states, had traditionally held its first major1 regional tournament of the year in February. The site had been in Cromwell CT for as long as I had been playing. However, the demise of the Red Lion Hotel forced it to be moved to Sturbridge MA in 2020. The name of the last four or five events had been the Presidential Regional, because it ended on the weekend of Presidents Day. The name was maintained in 2023 even the the tournament was scheduled for February 7-11, the week before its usual appearance. The site was the Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center, which had also been used for the Spectacle Regional in the previous November, as described here. The 2023 Presidential was was scaled-down tournament of only five days designed to minimize the number of directors needed.
The Southbridge Hotel and Conference Center.
I was not excited about the schedule. There were no team games at all on Tuesday or Friday; if I played. I would be in the top flight. Wednesday featured a two-day knockout. Saturday had a three-flighted Swiss. I tried to get a partner from the pairing person, Denise Bahosh, but she could not find anyone for me. Eventually, one of my regular partners, Eric Vogel, agreed to play with me in the knockout. Our teammates were Jeanne Striefler and Jim Macomber from the Hartford Bridge Club.
I had played every day at every regional tournament for quite a few years. However, I decided not to play on Tuesday, Friday, or Saturday of this one. The drive to the hotel was not likely to be difficult as long as the weather cooperated. So, I decided to commute back and forth on Wednesday and Thursday. I also needed to be at the hotel for the meeting of the Executive Committee on Friday evening. I planned to drive then as well.
Jim Macomber and Jeanne Striefler.
The weather was fine. On both days I stopped at McDonald’s in Stafford for my usual sausage biscuit with egg sandwich. Our team had just the right amount of points. We were the top-seeded team in the second bracket. Nine teams were in our bracket. We had to play an eight-round Round Robin, which we easily won. That gave us the right to choose which of the third and fourth teams we would play on Thursday. I chose to play the Sattinger team rather than the team from Vermont. Those two teams had finished with the same number of victory points, and we had defeated them both by the same margin. One of the pairs from Vermont played Precision3. I worried that if Jim and Jeanne faced them, they might have difficulty handling a radically different bidding system.
Our morning round of twenty-four hands was against Michael and Ulla Sattinger of Slingerlands, NY, a team that I have played against many times over the years. Eric and I were East-West. On the very first hand I made an overly aggressive bid that turned out to be costly. Eric also made a fairly serious mistake on a different hand. However, things must have gone better in the other room. At lunch we were ahead by twelve points, which was a reasonably comfortable margin.
Eric Vogel.
Eric and I played better in the second half, but North-South held better cards on most of the hands. Ulla and Michael bid and made a few game contracts, but the hands seemed rather straightforward. I did not see any hands on which swings were likely. I was wrong. Jim and Jeanne did not bid several of those games and settled for setting their opponents in undoubled partial scores.
This was very upsetting to me. I had expected us to play as well as on the previous day. My record in knockout matches in the past was quite good, and I was convinced that things were lined up favorably for us. In retrospect I suspect that Jim and Jeanne might have gotten tired. Neither of them had played in any tournaments since the pandemic, and they had played in far fewer of them than I had before that. They were basically club players, and they had seldom played two sessions in one day, much less on two consecutive days.
After lunch we had to play against a team captained by Abhi (AH vee) Dutta, with whom I had played in a few tournaments. They had the second-best record in the Round Robin, but they had lost to the Vermonters in the semifinal. So, this match would determine who finished third. Eric and I were East-West against Abhi and Paul Johnson, a player from Connecticut with less than 750 masterpoints. Abhi had always been a deliberate player, and, at least in this match, Paul was at times unbearably slow—taking several minutes to make some decisions. At the half they were ahead by six points.
I told Jim and Jeanne that they would switch to East-West to face Abhi and Paul in the second set of twelve boards. Eric and I played against Liv Carroll and Louis DiOrio. Since they came from different corners of the district; they probably had been paired up by the Partnership Desk. We had a very pleasant match with them. Eric and I did not make any serious errors, but neither did they. It was hard to say if we had made up the deficit.
We had been waiting thirty minutes for the other match to finish when Eric announced that he had to leave to go to a meeting. This would ordinarily not have been a big deal, but it turned out that we won the second half by six points, and so our match ended in a tie. Jeanne tried to reach Eric by phone, but he was miles away and unwilling to return to play in a four-board playoff. So, we had to concede. It was the perfect ending to an awful day.
I drove back on Friday for the meeting of the Executive Committee. According to Curtis Barton, the President of the New England Bridge Conference, everything was “fabulous”. Attendance was better than at the 2022 tournaments, and some headway seemed to be being made, but it did not seem fabulous to me. The tournament was better than nothing, but it still seemed rinky-dink to me. To me the most amazing thing was how much money the district still had after a string of disastrous tournaments. The person most responsible was unquestionably Joe Brouillard, the treasurer.
The most hilarious moment occurred after Joe proposed eliminating the stipend to the secretary (Carolyn Weiser) and treasurer (himself) at tournaments. After some bizarre discussion there was a secret ballot. The motion failed 12-1. Everyone thought that Joe and Carolyn were worth every penny. The other important argument was that, heaven forbid, we were faced with replacing them, we needed to have every incentive available.
Granite State Getaway: I could not find partners for the six-day tournament in June in Nashua, NH. That was too bad; I would have liked to play in the knockouts; I even had teammates lined up for one of them.
Sue and I drove up on the morning of Saturday, June 24. The first half of the trip was in the rain, which was particularly heavy on the Mass Pike. By the time that we reached the hotel it was sunny.
I played with Sally Kirtley, the tournament manager, in the A/X pairs. We were badly overmatched. Sue also played in a pairs game and did not do very well.
At the Executive Committee meeting we learned that this was probably the last time that a District 25 regional will be held at the Sheraton. The hotel wants to increase the rate dramatically. Sally solicited and received a large number of suggestions for places with large spaces that were not directly associated with hotels. Joe emphasized that something needed to be done to strengthen the Grass Roots Fund. Before the pandemic most units specified one of their days as Grass Roots days. The district received funds from those games.
There was some discussion about doing the GNT qualifying in person, but I was the only person who felt strongly that it was a huge mistake to award gold points for online play.
No food was served at the meeting. Sue and I ate supper at Lui Lui. I had a delicious pizza and a beer. I questioned the waitress about on of the cartoonish paintings plainly captioned in Spanish, not Italian. She said that she knew nothing about it.
On Sunday morning at the meeting of the Board of Delegates we again heard about how fabulous things were. Only four people represented Connecticut—Peter Marcus, Paul Burnham, Sue, and me. At the end I took a couple of minutes to describe the Weiss-Bertoni award (introduced here) and to present it to Joe Bertoni. He was pretty choked up about receiving it, but, in my opinion, he definitely deserved it. I just hope that he continues the tradition of presenting it to other worthy recipients.
I scheduled an email to go out at 10AM to announce the winner.
The traffic on the return trip was awful. We arrived home more than a half hour later than we expected. It felt weird not to wonder whether the cats were all right.
If it were not for the presentation of the Weiss-Bertoni aware, I would have considered the trip a complete waste of time, gasoline, and money.
Mike Heider and Jim Osofsky.
Ocean State Regional: For some reason that I do not understand the tournament in Warwick, RI, on the Labor Day weekend was scheduled for only five days beginning on Tuesday, August 29. Knockouts were scheduled for Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday. I was fortunate to learn that Jim Osofsky’s regular partner, Mike Heider, would be in Germany with his sons that week. So, Jim agreed to play as my partner for both of the knockouts. He arranged for Abhi and Paul Johnson to be our teammates in the one starting on Thursday. In the first knockout Denise Bahosh, the Partnership Chairman arranged for us to team up with Mike Baker and Susan Swope, two players from Florida who had roughly the same number of masterpoints as Jim and I.
I had decided to play four days, attend the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening, and skip Saturday. I was able to use my IHG Rewards points to pay for my three nights at the Crowne Plaza in Warwick.
Jim and Mike H. played Precision, but Jim played 2/1 in club games. He lived in Deerfield, MA, and Mike H. lived in southern CT. So, they only played together at tournaments. I had played against them innumerable times.Jim and I had exchanged emails about bidding issues, and we had come to pretty good agreement about the convention card. Still, there were a few issues to be ironed out. So we agreed to meet at the hotel at 9:00 on Tuesday morning.
Judy and Sue.
Sue also wanted to attend the tournament, but, as usual, she did not get any partners until the last minute. On Monday evening she had arranged to play with her friend and long-time partner, Judy Cavagnaro in the Gold Rush pairs. Sue needed gold points to become a Life Master. When I went to bed she had not decided whether she would ride with me or take her own car. I planned to leave at 7:15.
Google Maps recommended taking the back roads to the Crowne Plaza. It took a little over an hour and 45 minutes, but I stopped at McDonald’s.
At 6:30 on Tuesday morning Sue informed me that we would ride together, but she wanted to take her car. Her plan was to provide for the possibility that she might want to come home early. When I asked how I was supposed to get home, she answered that she would drive to Warwick (a trip of at least an hour and forty-five minutes) to pick me up at 7PM on Friday after the meeting of the Executive Committee. I considered this to be ridiculous, but I was wise enough not to press that opinion.
At 7:03 Sue informed me that I should leave at 7:15 by myself. She would drive her own car. I decided not to stop at McDonald’s in Stafford. Instead I set as my destination on Google Maps the McDonald’s on Route 2 in Warwick. I picked up my sandwich there and arrived at the hotel at precisely 9AM.
Jim was already there, talking on his cellphone. His mother, who suffered from Alzheimer’s, was receiving memory care at a place very close to the Crowne Plaza. He was negotiating whether she needed a private nurse. I got a coffee and ate my breakfast.
At 9:30 we met our teammates, Mike and Susan. We had enough time to converse a little. Mike had a house in Rhode Island. Susan lived in Florida throughout the year.
For some reason the official schedule called the event in which we were playing the “Premier Knockout”. It was limited to players with 4,000 or less masterpoints4. Sixteen teams registered. The directors split it into two eight-team sections. Four of the eight teams in the top bracket had more total points than we did.
Jim and I played pretty well throughout the seven matches. We lost two close matches, including the last one to Abhi’s team, but our total of 91 victory points was much higher than that of any other team.
As in February I was allowed to choose our opponent in the semifinal on Wednesday from the third and fourth teams. This whole scene was eerily similar to what had occurred in Southbridge. On this occasion, however, we had blitzed the fourth-place team Mullin), and the other team included an extremely talented young player named Ethan Wood. It seemed like an easy call to pick Mullin.
Meanwhile Judy and Sue had done very well in the Gold Rush Pairs. They finished fourth out of thirty-six pairs and won 2.32 gold and 0.65 red masterpoints. Sue decided to accept the invitation from Sally Kirtley to play in the evening side game. Apparently she was having a great time and did not want it to end. Also, she seldom turned down an invitation to anything.
You pick up orders at that little red area.
I drove to KFC and picked up an eight-piece family meal. I ordered a large Diet Coke as well, but for some reason the person who took the order and got everything else right, did not include the drink. I had to pay $3.50 for a 10-oz. bottle at the hotel. We were also annoyed to discover that they had neglected to include any napkins or sporks. In my suitcase I discovered some napkins and silverware from a previous trip. Sue ate a chicken wing before the side game started.
While she was gone I ate supper and watched the ninth (penultimate) episode of the first season of Sneaky Pete on Freevee. I loved the show, but the plot was so complicated. I was dying of curiosity to find out the resolution in episode 10, but watching it on the hotel’s free Wi-Fi was almost intolerable. It kept timing out, and I needed to restart it.
After taking a shower I read a chapter of Holy Orders, the sixth of the quasi-mysteries written by Benjamin Black. Black’s style5 is exceptionally good. The plots are intricate, but they do not follow any of the traditional forms for crime fiction. The central character, an Irish pathologist named Quirke does not solve the mysteries. His friend, a police detective who is more Inspector Plodder than Sherlock Holmes, explains the situation at the end.
I went to sleep early. Although I was wearing my eye-mask and earplugs, I was still awakened when Sue returned to the room. I managed to get back to sleep, however, and I was well-rested in the morning.
We went to the Jefferson Diner for breakfast. I had a ham and Swiss omelette. It was good, and the home fries were better than they looked.
The Jefferson Diner.
The Mullin team consisted of a pair of ladies, Susan Mullin and Sheila Middleton, and two men, Steven Colman and Mark Sunderlin. Although Sheila, Steven, and Mark were all from Massachusetts, neither Jim nor I had previously played against any of them. They had the most points of any team. So, they must have been playing for a very long time in club games. We were not impressed by the ladies’ performance in the match in the previous day’s event. The two men were apparently long-time partners. They both lived on Cape Cod.
They opted to switch their chairs so that Jim and I played against the men. They announced that they were playing Precision. I had invented a defense against strong club systems. I called it WavaDONT. I had to explain it first to Jim and then to the opponents:
Overcalls of the 1♣ bid at the one and three-levels were natural—showing five and seven pieces respectively.
With a six-piece suit bid 1NT, which is a relay to 2♣ to be passed or corrected.
With a two-suited overcall bid the lower suit as in DONT.
With a very strong hand double.
Our opponents called the director, Tim Hill, to ask whether it was legal for us to use such a complicated (?) defense against their system in a game at “this level”. Tim said that he was “99.9 percent certain” that we could use whatever defense that we wanted. It turned out to be immaterial. In twenty-four hands they never opened 1♣!
The two guys seemed much better than the ladies. In the first half there were two consecutive swing hands. On the first one our teammates made 3NT. Our opponents went down in 4♠. In the other I went down in 3♠. At the other table our teammates did not defend well and let them make 4♠. In total we had a flimsy lead of one imp.
I thought that we had won the second half easily. One of our opponents had revoked on a vulnerable hand that he might have made or gone down one. However, in the first six hands we found ourselves down by six imps. It was a great relief when we won the last six by eleven. So, we won the match by six imps.
In the finals we played Ethan Wood’s team. His partner was not very good, and we easily won both halves. So, we won the premier Premier Knockout and 20.13 gold points. The Mullin team won third place over a team of guys from Maine.
Jim, Sue, and I decided to eat at the Crow’s Nest, a seafood place that was only a few minutes south of the hotel. Sue and Jim, both from New England, consumed some kind of water-dwelling insects. I tried “The Burger”. which was described in the menu as “1⁄2 lb of all-natural free-range beef topped with cheddar, lettuce, pickles, secret sauce, brioche bun, fries.” The secret sauce tasted a lot like the sauce on a Big Mac, which must have been the intent. The problem was that there was so much slippery stuff that the meat kept falling out the bottom of the buns, and when I did get a taste of meat, it was overwhelmed by the other ingredients.
All in all, we had a good time. After winning a knockout I probably would have had a good time if they served me dog food, and I got ptomaine poisoning.
The drive back to Route 1 featured a body of water on the right. We did not even notice it on the way there, but on the return trip the road was pretty severely flooded. The discussion in the car concerned what has the biggest effect on tides. I was even asked my opinion. As a native of Kansas I had none.
On Thursday morning I ate a piece of leftover chicken, and Sue consumed one of her spherical “crab cakes” for breakfast. I consumed one of the coffee pods in the Keurig and secreted one in my suitcase in hope that the cleaning person (who only came on Tuesday and Thursday)6 might refill the empty slots in the pod holder.
Steve Lister.
Sue had obtained a partner for Thursday’s Gold Rush Pairs game at the partnership desk. His name was Steve Lister. I found a photo of him that was taken at the 2019 event in Warwick when he won a couple if 299er pairs games.
I was not too sanguine about our chances in the Thursday-Friday Knockout, which had the same format as the one that we won. Our team had about 3,000 less points than our victorious foursome. Nevertheless, we were the fifth-seeded team in bracket #1 again. This time there were only seven teams per bracket. We therefore played six rounds of eight boards.
We did not do very well. We barely avoided last place. We got clobbered in the last two rounds by the team that won the event and the team that was in last place. I was slightly upset about the last result. Our teammates missed bidding two slams. On one they settled for a game and made seven. On the other they let the other team play in hearts.
The first of those hands was a comedy of errors at our table. The North-South team was Ulla and Michael. Ulla opened 1[suite x=’H’]. Michael bid 2NT to show a game-going hand with four pieces. Ulla rebid 3♠, which was supposed to show a singleton or void in spades—she actually had a doubleton. Michael cued the club suit; Ulla cued diamonds; Michael bid 4NT, asking for key cards. Ulla showed two of the five key cards (four aces and the king of trumps) without the queen. Michael bid 7♥ even though he knew—or at least should have known—that they were off a key card. If it was an ace, as certainly was likely, the contract was impossible. If it was a 50% play. In short, it was a terrible bid.
Ulla could not believe that he went to seven with only two key cards, but the one that they were missing was the Jim’s king of trumps, which could easily be finessed. So they made it. This was the first hand of the match. I knew that we were doomed. My play during the next five hands was uninspired.
So, on Friday we had to play in the Open Swiss or a pairs game. We decided to play in the Swiss.
Sue and I went out to eat with three people from the Northampton, MA, Yan Drabek, Rich McClure, and Allison Ryan. I really needed to get away from Jim O. for a while. He talks during every break between the hands, and I grew tired of listening to him. I was also down on Abhi and Paul after the last two rounds.
The parking lot was full when we visited The Shanty.
Our destination for supper was the Shanty, a small restaurant on Route 1 not very far south of the Crow’s Nest. It was another seafood place. We had two appetizers, yam fries and sweet soy chicken wings. The service was slow and Yan was very hungry. Everyone else liked them a lot. I thought that they were OK, but I would have preferred the wings without the sauce.
I ordered the baby back ribs, which were described as “honey glazed ribs, patatas bravas, corn, sriracha mayo, Parmesan, cilantro.” The last four were all mixed together and also covered with the glaze. I must say that this was the first time that I have ever been disappointed with the way that a restaurant prepared baby back ribs. I ate all the meat, but I barely touched the other stuff. I also had a beer.
The conversation, however, was great. I really perked up when Rich first asked about how to defend against Precision and then how to bid when the opponents play a Weak 1NT system. Everyone also laughed at my impression of Jim explaining things. He was a nice guy and a good player, but he just talked and talked. Yan, Allison, and Rich know him well; they all play in the Northampton Bridge Club.
The most amazing thing about this meal was that the other three participants seemed to have no idea how to split a check. I had to step in and do the arithmetic for them.
I went to sleep shortly after we arrived back at the hotel. I awakened at 3:30, and I never did get back to sleep. I finished up the chicken for breakfast. The rest of the day I stayed awake by imbibing caffeine.
Sue decided that she would not play on Friday. Steve L. was required to be home to celebrate his birthday. If he had been willing to play, she probably would have stayed. Her plan was to use the pool after all of the bridge players were busy playing and then check out of the hotel.
I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep. This happened to me on a fairly regular basis. By the time of the first round I had been up for 6.5 hours. I had consumed plenty of caffeine in the interim, but I was still groggy in the first round. I failed to recognize a splinter and identified it as a weak bid. This resulted in a big swing that cost us the first match. I righted the ship after that shocking mistake.
We bumped around in the middle for most of the day, but we had a couple of big wins. We lost the last match on a hand on which I opened 1NT with a flat 15 and everyone passed. I went down one. Somehow our teammates lost 200 points even though neither side was vulnerable. I did not even ask how they did it.
I rushed off to the Executive Committee meeting with out checking our results. It turned out that we had 84 victory points, which was good enough for fourth in B and 2.66 gold points.
Hardly anyone was there when the Executive Committee meeting was schedule to begin. Someone decided that we should have food again, but we had to order from the sandwich menu. My Reuben sandwich was on the counter with a silver cover that bore my name on a tag. The French fries were surprisingly good. but the sandwich was cold. The sodas were brought in halfway through the meeting.
Curtis.
Curtis Barton, the president, called the meeting to order and, as usual, announce how fabulous everything was. He mentioned the fact that Mark Oettinger had resigned as vice-president, and he had appointed Sue Miguel as temporary vice-president.
Mark Aquino, the Regional Director, said that Bridge Base Online (BBO) was sold to a French company with no concern for the state of bridge. They were only interested in money. The ACBL’s contract runs out in 2025.
The table rate for youth players was set, as was a new rate for online NAP and GNT games. This was done to help boost the balance in the Grass Roots Fund.
I suggested that the Tournament Scheduling Committee should consider offering the Pro-Am game in the evening. After some cajoling I volunteered to manage it for the tournament scheduled for Southbridge in February of 20247.
I took a can of Diet Coke and consumed it on the drive home. I arrived at exactly 9 PM, and the miles-per-gallon read 40.1, but I have long suspected that it overstates the car’s actual mileage by about 5 percent.
The last tournament of the year, which was called “The Return of the Gala“, was held in Marlborough8, MA, from October 31 through November 5. The original Gala was held at the same site in May of 2022. I missed it because I was on the European cruise that was described here.
I planned on playing for five of the six days, but I had a very difficult time finding partners and teammates. I was fortunate that Eric Vogel agreed to play as my partner in the two knockouts held the first four days, but he could not play on Saturday. More than a month before the tournament started I submitted electronic forms to the partnership person, Denise Bahosh, for teammates for the knockouts and for a partner for Saturday. I had to pretend that I wanted to play in the open pairs on Saturday. If I could find a partner, I would try to convince him/her to switch to the Swiss.
The playing area was on the ground floor on the far right.
Sue Miguel had sent an email in early September that claimed that the hotel, a Best Western (BW) property called the Royal Plaza Hotel and Trade Center, was only recognizing the tournament rate until the end of September.9 So, I made reservations for one double room for four days.I planned to drive home after the Executive Committee meeting on Saturday evening. I had forgotten that there would be a meeting of the Board of Delegates on Sunday, and I was unaware that the Executive Committee meeting had been scheduled for Friday.
Denise tried to match Eric and me up with Alan Godes (introduced here) and an unknown teammate. I was somewhat reluctant to commit us to join up with them, but it turned out not to matter. Alan did not respond to my email for some time. In the interim Denise proposed that we play with Carol Seager and Michelle Blanchard (introduced here) in the first KO. I had played with them before and had a reasonably good experience. So, I agreed to teaming up, and so did they.
Meanwhile Alan wrote me to say that he had teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO, but he needed to find someone for the first one. I explained that we had just found teammates for that event. I don’t think that Alan ever found teammates.
Just before the tournament Denise informed me that she could not find a partner for me for Saturday. So, on the eve of the tournament I had big gaps in my dance card.
Sue could not find partners either. She wanted to attend the Board of Delegates meeting on Sunday, but it did not make much sense for her to drive up just to attend. It would be about a seventy-five-minute drive even on a Sunday morning.
On the morning of Tuesday, October 31, I set off in my Honda for Marlborough by myself. The drive was relatively easy. The only problem was that the first leg of the journey was due west on Route 190. In a few places the sun was directly in my eyes. I had my sunglasses on, but even so it was blinding. Still, even though I made my customary stop at McDonald’s in West Stafford, I made excellent time. I arrived at about 8:45, much earlier than I expected.
The only difficult part of the drive was finding the hotel. On I-495 the exit for the hotel was labeled Route 20 west. The street’s local name was Boston Post Road.
The hotel was located on a road that went north from the Post Road called “Royal Plaza Drive”, which was really more like a driveway. There was no street sign that I could see. Later I noticed a large “Best Western” sign, but on my first pass I was searching for a street sign, not a sign with five or six logos on it. Because the Post Road had a median I had to continue to the next stoplight and then make two U-turns to return to the spot where Google Maps had told me to turn.
I definitely did notice the sign for the Hampton Inn, which was located right on the Post Road. I definitely took mental not of the fact that the Hampton and a lot of other more modern hotels were quite close to the BW.
The road to the hotel had one striking feature—an oversized speed bump that was quite jarring if taken at more than 5 mph. The hotel’s parking lot was gigantic. It was mostly empty when I arrived, but at night a large number of big trucks parked there. I don’t know whether the hotel charged them for this privilege.
I parked on the right near the door to the exhibition center. Many of the people who were already there had on costumes. Gary Peterson (introduced here) had by far the most elaborate one. He was dressed as the King of Hearts, complete with crown and mace. One woman wore a long bathrobe; I think that she intended to be a geisha. I thought that all of the costumes seemed creepy. I had on my black trousers and shirt and my Halloween tie. The neck on my shirt must have shrunk. It had become too small for me. I was uncomfortable all day.
Sally Kirtley was wearing some kind of semi-costume, but what caught my attention was the fact that she had on her Tournament Manager badge. That reminded me that I had accidentally left my Goodwill pin and Executive Committee name tag at home. I remembered getting them out of my backpack. What I did not remember was that I had also put them back in the pack. Later I decided that I did not need to bring the pack.
When I arrived the playing area was very cold. For the first half hour or forty-five minutes there was no coffee. I sat by myself and shivered even though I was wearing the jacket that I had bought (and almost never needed) for my European cruise eighteen months earlier. A few people dropped by to say hello to me.
At about 9:30 I located Carol and Michelle. I expected Eric to be there at any minute. He was still missing ten minutes later, and, in fact, there were very few people around the table where they sold entries for the two knockout events. Carol gave me her credit card, and I used mine for Eric and me when I bought the entry. Our preliminary number was 102, which meant that only one other entry had been sold.
I had my phone in my hand to call Eric at about 9:50, but I saw him before I could find his name in the contacts. He reported that he had arrived early, and the hotel let him check in. So, this was my first clue that our group constituted the vast majority of the hotel’s guests.
Unused knockout enty.
I asked the director, David Metcalf, how many entries they had sold. He replied that four teams were in the top bracket and four in the 0-4,000. Carol insisted that we drop out and play in the pairs, and I agreed. Two of the original four teams played in the open KO and were given handicaps.
Eric and I won some points in both sessions of the open pairs, but we did not set the world on fire. There were about twenty-two tables in each session. None of the hands stood out for me.
I am not sure why so few people chose to play in the knockouts.
The lunch break was more than an hour. After I ate my roast beef sandwich and chips, I checked in and went to the room that I had been assigned, #263. I discovered when I opened my shaving kit that I had forgotten my toothbrush. I used one end of a Q-tip to paint my teeth with toothpaste. I also used a proxabrush and floss.
Eli had a beard in Marlborough.
I sent an email to Eli Jolley, who had filled out a card looking for teammates for the Thursday-Friday KO. He had 3,000 masterpoints, and his partner had 2,000. A few minutes later he replied that he would like to team up. I said that I would be around the partnership desk at 9:30 on Thursday morning, and many people would know me.
In the second session we played two hands against a couple who played the Polish Club, which has a three-way 1♣, Kris and Dorota Jarosz. I decided that we would play the defense that I had devised against what I called faux club systems. It involved using a 1♦ bid to make a two-suited overcall. We did well against them.
Sue Miguel kept interrupting the bridge to give awards for costumes. There were also gift cards given as door prizes. She must have used the word “fabulous” ten times. I was ready to puke.
Eric and I got points in both lackluster sessions. If I had had my druthers, I would have just driven home after we found out that there would be no KO.
When I got back to the room after the second session I phoned my wife Sue at home to tell her about the fiasco in the KO.
On Tuesday evening Eric, who is a vegetarian who sometimes eats fish, and I went out for supper. He wanted to try a place called Atlantic Poké. He tried to figure out how to get there from a map that was available near the welcome desk. We finally found it, but it was just a small place that seemed to specialize in takeout. The accent on the “e” made me think that it was probably sushi, the one thing that I have always refused to eat.
So, Eric said that the Longhorn Steakhouse was acceptable. I dialed it up on Google Maps, and we found it rather quickly in the corner of a strip mall. Eric had salmon, and I ate the baby back ribs. We talked about our careers. I learned that after Eric had been laid off from Pratt & Whitney he went to CPI and learned to program. He spent the rest of his career in IT at insurance companies.
I also learned that Eric had done quite a bit of work on Y2K. The part that he did sounded ugly indeed. He also mentioned that it was impossible to get Fortran programs converted to COBOL because they had different rounding mechanisms. He probably would have liked working at TSI, and I would have liked to have him.
I tried to watch an episode of The Bridge on my laptop, but I couldn’t get interested in it. I also tried to read from the book that I had picked up at the Hartford Bridge Club, Mexico Days by Robert Roper, but the light in the room was so dim that I gave up after about one page.
When I went to get into the shower the tub had water in it. I slipped and fell on my back on the floor of the bathroom. I was not seriously injured but I smashed my right hand against the baseboard. I put bacitracin on the small cut after the bleeding stopped. By the way, there was a handle outside of the tub, and I did grasp it as I entered the tub. Nevertheless, I could not stop the fall.
To get the water out of the tub I needed to shove a plastic Bic razor that I always brought for emergencies between the stopper and the lip of the drain.
I did not think much of my room. However, it did have a refrigerator into which I placed the two bottles of water that the desk clerk gave me when I checked in. There was also a microwave, but I did not use it. The bed was quite comfortable, and the heat worked without a problem.
Breakfast was free. I met Eric in the restaurant (which only served supper on Fridays and Saturdays) at 8:15 on Wednesday morning. They served pretty much the same thing every morning: scrambled eggs (plain and with something added), meat (sausage or bacon), French toast sticks with syrup, fruit, and yogurt. Juice and coffee were available from extremely old machines. The sausage that they served on Wednesday and Friday was much better than Thursday’s overcooked bacon. The French toast was much too chewy.
Afterwards we played with Michelle and Carol in the open Swiss. There were only twelve teams. In the first round I played 3NT two hands in a row. The first one was routine. On the second one I had eight tricks. There was also some potential for more in some suits. The problem was spades, where the dummy had only a doubleton, and I held Kx. Sure enough, the lead was a low spade. I played a card from dummy. Then the player on my right pulled two cards from her hand, the queen and ten of spades, and dropped them on the table. We called the director.
Tim Hill came to the table and explained that she could play either card. The other would be a “major penalty card”. She chose to play the queen. I scored my king. Now I only needed one trick. I crossed to the dummy in hearts and took a finesse in clubs. It lost, but I was allowed to tell the left-hand opponent not to lead a spade. In the end I was able to win ten tricks before they got their spades. If she had dropped the cards on the table, I could never have made it.
When we returned to our teammates’ table, I said that unfortunately we had probably used up all of our luck for the day in the first round. They thought that they had done badly, and they had, but the gain from my lucky 3NT game was enough for us to claim victory.
The celebration was short. We played against Mark Aquino’s team in the second round and got blitzed. That was the first of four consecutive blitzes that we endured. This was even worse than the performance in the Swiss at the NABC in Boston (described here).
I played none of the thirty-two hands in the four blitz rounds. One hand in the middle of the blitzkrieg deserved emphasis. I held KQJ10 and three little clubs, a singleton diamond, Ax in hearts and Kxx in spades. Eric opened 1♣! I wasted no time and bid 4♦, which asked him how many aces he had. His answer indicated all three! I thought for only a few seconds before bidding 6♣.
Eric had to play it. I could tell from the look on his face that it was going to be difficult, and it was. He won only my seven clubs, the three outside aces, and the ♠K. At the time I thought that it was due to an unlucky lay of the cards, but I should have known better.
Eric’s opening bid indicated that he had either three clubs or more clubs than diamonds. In any case he had four or fewer hearts and spades. Unless he had precisely one diamond and four in the other suits, he had less than 15 points. If he had had 15-17 points with a balanced hand, he would have bid 1NT. So, he was very unlikely to have either of the missing kings. I was essentially gambling that he had the ♠Q! It was possible, but not very likely.
I should have just responded 2♣ to set the trump suit. We would then bid stoppers up the line. When I was certain of stoppers in every suit, I should have signed off in thee lowest available notrump bid.
In the sixth and last round we played against Alan Godes’s team. The match ended in a tie. Somehow it seemed fitting.
At that point I considered it to have been an unspeakably bad tournament. It got a little better at supper, which we ate with Ben and Ginny Bishop. At the time Ben was the president of the HBC. One of Ben’s sons had recommended a restaurant called Welly’s in the neighboring town of Hudson.
I found a shortcut!
For some reason we took two cars. Ben knew where it was. I was confident that I had programmed Google Maps to report the directions to Welly’s Restaurant in Hudson (there was also a Welly’s in Marlborough).
Somehow I got the directions for Willy’s Steakhouse in Shrewsbury, MA. So I turned a fifteen-minute trip into one that took much more than half an hour. Ben and Ginny had to wait for us.
I don’t think that I spoiled the evening. I had a Reuben sandwich, which was pretty good. The stars of the meal from my perspective, however, were the tall glass of Guinness and the onion rings. The latter were both delicious and plentiful.
We got to learn a little about Ginny’s career in nursing. The rest of the evening was spent with Ben, Eric, and I swapping war stories about working with computers. They were both pretty impressed to learn that I had personally installed thirty-six AdDept systems.
Ben also told us about his two sons. They both had worked for the MITRE Corporation. I had never heard of a non-profit that worked with the federal government.
We found our way back to the hotel without any problem.
On Thursday morning I learned that Eli was a relatively young pro from Auburn, AL. I already knew his partner, Judy McNutt from western Massachusetts. She was wheelchair-bound.
Judy McNutt.
This time there were two brackets of eight teams in the 0-4,000 KO. We were the top-seeded team in the upper bracket. We won our first three matches rather easily. I decided to spend the break in my room resting and dining on the gifts that the lady at the front desk gave me when I checked in—a bag of chips, an energy bar, and water in a bottle. When I returned to the playing area I bought a can of Diet Coke.
Our streak continued after lunch We won the first two matches. At this point we had pretty much clinched a spot in the knockout on Friday. However, we were blitzed in the sixth round, which allowed the team that beat us to pull even with us. Both teams won blitzes in the last round. We were awarded first place based on the fractional victory point score that was in effect.
Eli asked me if I cared about whom we played. I told him that it was a difficult choice. The two teams, Page and Clay, were only one victory point apart, and we had defeated both of them in the Swiss by small margins. I picked to play the Page team because the other team seemed to me to have a stronger East-West pair. I hoped to protect Judy, who was definitely our weak link.
Eric and I ate supper with Donna Feir, the manager of the HBC, and Sally Kirtley. At my suggestion we went to Evviva, a casual Italian restaurant. Two HBC players, Tom Gerchman and Dan Finn were already seated nearby. They were going over the hands from the pairs game. I ordered the Bolognese (at Evviva they put the bowl in Bolognese) and a glass of Montepulciano.
Donna Feir.
The conversation at supper was not extremely memorable, but I enjoyed it. It was the first time in my fifteen years as a member of the HBC that I had been in a social situation with Donna. I did learn that the tournament in February would be the combination sectional and regional, and it would be held in Mansfield. The Presidential Regional had been assassinated. The tournament in Southbridge would be in April.
After we drove back to the hotel Donna and Sally played in the side game. I went to my room and watched part of the football game between TCU and Texas Tech. Texas Tech was ahead 20-7 when I turned it off at the half, and the Red Raiders held on for the victory.
I got the bright idea of dragging the pole lamp over to the side of the bed. I cocked the shade so that it produced enough light to read by. I read a chapter or so before I took a shower and then went to bed.
At 3:00 I awakened and spent an hour and spent about an hour working out the combinatorial probabilities of that slam hand that failed. I only went to sleep when I realized that it was almost impossible for Eric to have either missing king.
I wore an N95 mask the first three days. Less than 10 percent of the other players did so. However, the rigidity of the mask bothered the bridge of my nose, and I had deep gouges in the side of my face. Since I would only be at the same table as four others, I decided to leave it in room 263.
Mark Oettinger.
After breakfast on Friday I went over to the table occupied by Steve Ackerman and Sue Collinson from Vermont. I asked them if they knew what the backstory was for Mark Oettinger’s sudden and—to me, at least—shocking resignation. Steve said that Peter Marcus had called Mark and insisted that he should resign. Steve said that it was “pretty nasty”. Later that morning I met up with Joe Brouillard. I asked him if he knew what had happened. He said that he had been surprised by it and knew no details.
I thought back to an email that I had received from Sandy DeMartino asking me about Mark’s performance. I explained that he seemed OK to me, but my interaction with him had been limited by the fact that I was unable to attend three consecutive meetings of the Tournament Scheduling Committee, at which the strategy for recovery from the Pandemic was decided. I had then resigned from the committee because I was spending so much time on the HBC, the CBA, and this project.
Sandy DeMartino.
Sandy said that Peter Marcus had telephoned her and asked her to support Sue Miguel as the next president of D26. Sandy declined to do so. I think that this must have been before the call to Mark.
I found all of this to be deeply disconcerting. At the close of my conversation with Steve and Sue I asked them if they thought that I should make a stink about this at the Executive Committee meeting on Friday evening. Steve advised against it. Sue was silent.
We lost the match against the Page team. All of the swings in the first set were in the first six boards that Eric and I played. I did not think that we had played badly. We won the second set by eight, but that was not nearly enough.
I bought a salad, which was barely edible, and a Diet Coke for lunch. I ate by myself and had a hard time keeping the Oettinger affair out of my head.
I checked the cards on the partnership desk. I could scarcely believe that no one was looking for partners for Saturday’s open pairs game. I don’t know what I would have done if I had not canceled my hotel reservation.
The first set of the consolation game after lunch was easy to analyze. We did not bid three games that our opponents did. Two of those were my decisions. The games came home because on both hands Eric and I had a secondary fit in the diamond suit that, because of aggressive interference by the opponents, neither of us got a chance to show the other.
Wee came back strong again in the second set. However, we lost ten imps because Eric opened a flat hand with a 12-count, something that I would never do. I had nineteen points. I responded 2NT, which for us showed 12-14 or 18-19 points. Eric bid 3NT, which indicated that he had no short suits. I bid 3NT, which went down. If Eric had had the thirteen points that I expected, I would have made the bid, and we would have won the match. If he had opened a minor with the hand that he had, we would have fallen a few imps short.
I was pretty sure that I had ordered a roast beef sandwich for the box lunch that the hotel provided for the Executive Committee meeting. However, there was nothing but turkey and tuna. I certainly did not order tuna. So I took a turkey sandwich that had a lot of dry meat and bread. I can’t complain. An apple and a bag of chips were also provided.
Mark Aquino.
The main topic of conversation was whether we should worry about scheduling regionals the same weekend as the regional in Lancaster, PA. Mark Aquino said that he had gotten an earful from the president of District 24. Peter Marcus and Sue Miguel were adamant that the “500-mile rule” that D24 cited did not exist. Evidently they hoped to draw more pros from New York City.
The schedule for the tournament in Southbridge February, which because it was near the Super Bowl, would have a football theme. I didn’t plan to go unless someone really wanted to play with me. I would not be eligible for the regional events, and the sectional events did not include any bracketed events. Maybe they will change that.
The meeting closed with a long lecture by Sue Miguel about how we all needed to get off of our butts and to participate in her many programs to recruit people to rejoin the ACBL and play in our tournaments. I found much of this offensive and wrong-headed, but she and Peter will not brook any opposition.
I am also convinced that the basic analysis is wrong. To me the problem was not the Pandemic so much as the ACBL’s reliance on online bridge as a source of money. Maybe it was necessary for the ACBL to survive, but it has now ruined some of the tools that we had used to put on attractive tournaments that made money. The current D25 administration has abandoned most of the aspects that I judged made the events compelling. No one seemed to want to hear this. Instead we have been treating our players like kids in junior high. Costume contests, door prizes, unsharpened pencils with “Day of the dead” figures on them: give me a break! All of the incentives were provided to new players. I saw no effort at transitioning anyone into the games that the district sponsors.
Also, I was supposed to represent Connecticut. There have been no regional tournaments in Connecticut since 2021, and none have been planned. We were told that there were no hotels. Is that possible?
I came away from the meeting with a very bleak outlook. For ten years I have loved to attend regional tournaments. At this point I could barely tolerated them, and they were expensive.
The drive back to Enfield was uneventful. The Honda entered the garage at 9 p.m.
1. Until 2016 there had been an Individual Regional in Newton, MA. It was discontinued because it was unprofitable. My report from the last such event was posted here.
2. The Red Lion was the last name of the hotel in Cromwell, CT, that hosted District 25’s regional tournament in February. In 2020—just days before the Presidential Regional—the state of CT closed down the hotel for failure to pay taxes. It never reopened. The tournament was moved to the Sturbridge Host for that one year.
3. Precision is a bidding system in which the strongest opening bid is at the lowest level—1♣. The Wikipedia article about it is here.
4. I had played in the previous 0-4000 Knockout at least five years earlier. It was a fiasco. Only five teams participated. We played all day in two five-way sessions to eliminate one team. One team had much less experience than the other four; they did not do well. Our team lost in the semifinals and was relegated to the Single-session Swiss.
5. Benjamin Black was the pen name assumed by award-winning novelist John Banville when he began writing genre fiction late in his career.
6. On my previous two visits to this hotel in 2022 no cleaning service was provided at all.
7. I learned months later that there would not be a tournament in Southbridge in 2022. This is explained in the Marlborough section.
8. The name of the Massachusetts town is officially Marlborough. There is a “hamlet” named Marlboro. The town in New Jersey with the same name shortened it to eliminate the “ugh” at the end, but the one in Massachusetts did not. Nevertheless, the highway signs mostly use the short version.
9. The hotel was not actually filled to anything approaching its capacity. I had to wonder it the hotel really enforced or even announced this policy.
In one sense my mother’s death in 1998 came as a shock to my dad. In the previous few years her health had deteriorated rapidly. However, for the vast majority of their relationship, she had been the one with the longer life expectancy. She was younger and female, she had never smoked so much as one cigarette, she had very regular habits, she made sure to get plenty of exercise, she ate healthy diet, and she drank very little.
My dad, on the other hand, smoked pretty regularly for nearly fifty years. He was not a drunkard by any measure, but he spent a lot of time with salesmen and advertising people for whom liquor was considered a lubricant. He ate whatever he felt like having (including raw hamburger!), and his only exercise was golf. Furthermore, he had had some kind of incident on a vacation in Arizona that had something to do with his heart.
Throughout their marriage mom was the head of the household. She cooked, cleaned, and did the laundry. She also paid all the bills and managed the cash. If something needed to be fixed or purchased, she took care it. My dad considered it his responsibility to provide enough income for her in the present and the future, and he definitely did that. However, he had never—at least since 1947—given much thought to the little details of daily life until my mom became incapacitated and then died. He confided to me that he always thought that he would die first, and with the insurance, pension, and investments, mom would be all right.
Shortly after mom’s death dad moved into a somewhat smaller apartment that was on the ground floor. Although I can clearly picture both it and its location, I have forgotten the address. My dad had a lot of good friends. I am quite sure that they helped him through the transition. They knew that he had depended on mom, and they gave him good advice about dealing with quotidian matters. They also kept him involved in social activities. At least once a week they had regular breakfasts together, and they invited him to other get-togethers. He also kept up his golf game, such as it was. Needless to say, he kept attending church.
Near the end of this period my dad had one of his hips replaced. I was not involved in the planning or execution, but he told me that the doctor said that the other hip was nearly as bad. His friends must have helped him deal with this as well. I remember that he seemed to be able to walk fairly well after the operation.
One problem that they could not address was his vision. Somehow the retina in his right (I think) eye became detached. He had no vision in it at all. He therefore, had no depth perception. To make matters worse, a cataract was developing in his left eye, which was more than 75 years old.
My dad’s driving ability was definitely suspect. At some point he decided to stop driving on major thoroughfares. This was a good idea. Drivers on heavily used road need good peripheral vision, and his one eye was not enough. Parking was also problematic because of the need to make precise judgments of distance.
He had planned out relatively safe routes to the places that he frequented. If we were going to one of those places—such as the house of one of his friends or a nearby eatery—he drove and I sat nervously in the passenger’s seat. More than once we went to a fairly upscale Italian restaurant in a nearby shopping center. The waiters did not know how to pronounce many items on the menu.
Although I was extremely busy during these years, I stopped in to see him whenever I could. Whenever I was scheduled for a trip to the Midwest or the West Coast I tried to add an extra day or two for a stop in Kansas City. I usually took the shuttle to and from KCI airport. We used his Ford Taurus to get around when I was there.
I made one special trip to be with him when he had the procedure to fix his cataract. Since his other eye was worthless, I had been very worried that in the unlikely event that something went wrong, he would be blind. However, when he came out his vision was much improved. He told me that he had always thought that the blue street signs in the area that he lived were green. Also, he could now see the letters clearly.
Pilgrimages: During my visits we almost always went to at least one favored restaurant that could not be reached easily on side streets or had problematic parking arrangements. I drove on those occasions The establishments that I remember very clearly were the Village Inn for huge breakfasts, Dixon’s for chili, and RC’s for fried chicken. These trips were more like pilgrimages that just dining out. Each deserves its own paragraph.
The Village1 Inn was located in Mission, KS. The only reasonable way to get there was to take Metcalf, which was a very busy four-lane road. The restaurant was similar to an IHOP, but they also offered something called a “skillet”. The menu explained, “Each skillet meat is prepared with country potatoes, two eggs, any style and served with a side of made from scratch buttermilk pancakes. Egg whites or low cholesterol egg substitute available.” That may sound like to much to eat, but the “Ultimate Skillet” added all of the following: “Two hickory smoked bacon strips, two sausage links, ham, mushrooms, green peppers, onions, tomatoes and melted cheese”. My dad usually ordered a slightly less ambitious skillet, but I generally settled for an omelette. Coffee cups at the Village Inn did not stay empty long.
Dixon’s2 chili was nothing like any you have tasted. It was Harry Truman’s favorite restaurant both before and after he was president. Their chili had no beans, but you could ask for some. However, if you demand catsup, you might be thrown out. Actually, you would only be “fined” ten cents. The chili is served on a plate. It is not very hot, but hot sauce and ground peppers are on the tables, and most diners make ample use of them. The restaurant that we patronized was on 75th St., a very busy artery. So, I always drove. Dad always ordered his with tamales. I preferred mine dry. The recommended beverage was RC Cola.
My mother made good fried chicken, but when I was growing up there were still several places in the Kansas City area that made exceptionally good fried chicken. When I was growing up our go-to restaurant for this delight was Boots and Coates. Later my dad found another good one in Martin City on 135th St., RC’s3. If I was in KC for more than one day, we drove there for supper.
The computer: My dad wrote a satirical book, Yup the Organization4, that was published in 1986. I am pretty sure that my mom typed the manuscript for him. No one else could read his handwriting, which to me always looked like rain.
He had other ideas for books. He somehow came into possession of a semi-computer made by Brother that could do word processing but nothing else. After mom died, he wanted to buy a computer so that he could send and receive emails, mostly from me. Someone else helped him buy it. It was left to me to describe how to use America Online.
It was hard for him to see the cursor. I adjusted it so that it was larger. Then I set up his account. I created an icon on the desktop for AOL.com. I showed him how he could move the cursor around by making similar movements of the mouse. I did not explain precisely how the mouse was able to cause this. Instead I had him practice double-clicking5 on the AOL icon. He finally got it to work, and the login screen appeared. He entered the user ID and the password that I had previously established. Almost as soon as he pressed Enter, the computer’s speakers greeted him with, “You’ve got mail!”
My dad was excited and justifiably proud of his accomplishments. Although I advised him strongly just to delete the items that appeared in his Inbox, he insisted on opening the first one. When he double-clicked on it the contents appeared on his screen. It was explicit pornography6 in vivid colors.
In shock he lifted the mouse off of its pad and waved it at the screen as one might use a crucifix to ward off a vampire. I despaired at the prospect of talking him through deleting the email. Instead, I wrested the mouse from him and did it myself.
Dad was eventually fairly competent in the use of text-based email. I never attempted to teach him about images or attachments.
I also tried to help my dad with word processing. He could enter and edit the text, and he knew how to save it. I tried to teach him how to copy and paste. He just could not seem to understand the concept at all, and, despite the fact that I had trained hundreds of people to do tasks much more complicated than copying and pasting, I eventually gave up.
So, he used the word processing on the computer in essentially the same manner as he used his old word processor—hunting, pecking, editing, saving, and printing.
He wrote two more books. I read them, but I did not like them. One was an insider’s look at how dad’s insurance company had gotten Senator Bob Dole to rescue them from a tax mess. The other was a fictional story about three brothers.7 Dad tried to get the Dole book published, but it never happened.
Other adventures: My dad loved to play golf. His vision limited his ability to do it. For a while a friend of his walked with him and spotted his ball for him. I don’t know how dad could have gauged the distance on putts. In all the time that I played with him, I never saw him measure a distance in number of strides, and doing such a calculation would have been foreign to the nature of someone who could not balance his checkbook.
I did not play any rounds of golf with him during this period, but we did go to a driving range together a few times. I had to describe to him how much slice he had imparted to each shot. He always said something like, “I’m not coming through the ball enough.” I had no idea what this meant.
I attended two or three of the all-male breakfast gatherings of my dad’s friends. At one of them someone asked me about my business. I explained how we installed AdDept systems to administer the advertising departments of large retailers such as Macy’s and Saks and how TSI was in the process of developing and marketing a service called AxN to process insertion orders from the retailers to their newspapers. Some of the guys were quite interested in the latter project.
I often ran a few miles in the morning. Once, on a fairly warm day, I did ten miles, and it wore me out. When I got to the apartment I lay motionless on the carpet. Dad nearly freaked out. I had overdone it a bit, but within ten minutes I was functional again. That’s what it is like to be a runner. You recover much faster than people think.
On September 18, 2004, dad and I watched the football game between Michigan and San Diego State, then coached by Brady Hoke. It was a terrible game. SDSU was ahead 21-17 at the half. As the teams left at halftime, the field announcer asked Lloyd Carr what he expected in the second half. He tersely said, “I expect a comeback.” U-M scored a touchdown early in third quarter. After that it was an excruciating duel between the two punters.
The big move: In 2005 my dad was diagnosed with macular degeneration in his left eye. He was given treatments to arrest it. They seemed to work, but he was still legally blind. He could not drive.
The area of KC that he lived in had no public transportation to speak of. I proposed that he sell his car and move closer to me and Sue.8 He wanted to give me his car, but I did not want it. I liked my car, and when I stopped liking it, I wanted to pick out my own model and color.
I expected that after he came to the area he would live in an apartment for a little while. Meanwhile Sue and I would erect an addition to the north side of our house tin Enfield to provide him with a place to stay. We did eventually add on to the house, but by then I had come to realize that the idea of him moving in with us would not work for a large number of reasons. It hurt me that I did not keep my promise, but I don’t know how I could have.
So, he lived by himself in apartments in Enfield for six years. That story is related here.
1. In 2023 The Village Inn in Mission appeared to be thriving. Sue and I also frequented the one in Clearwater, FL.
2. Dixon’s was renamed Fritz’s Chili at some point. However, no changes were made when the restaurant in Overland Park was purchased in 1967. It closed in 2018, one day before my dad’s 96th birthday, which he celebrated in another realm.
3. In 2023 RC’s was sold to a couple who announced their plan to leave fried chicken on the menu but also serve Thai food!
4. In 2023 dad’s book was still available on the Internet. He let me read the manuscript that he had submitted. It was pretty good. There was one vignette about a meeting that I particularly enjoyed. Unfortunately, the editor made him remove that item because he (or maybe she) found something potentially offensive. The end result was a work that could not decide whether it was satirical of a self-help book. The nonsensical title was also the editor’s idea; the book made no mention of Yuppies.
5. This took some time. My dad was extremely left-handed, but he used his right hand for the mouse. So, his right forefinger was challenged to perform an activity that his left hand had not yet mastered. Furthermore, to my knowledge he had never performed any kind of fine movement with his right hand. He had never learned the basics of any musical instrument. His typing was strictly hunt-and-peck, and he generally did more hunting than pecking.
6. This might have been the only pornography that my dad ever witnessed. Although he was a contemporary of Roger Sterling, he had a very different set of values. Foul language and off-color jokes or stories were not tolerated in our house. There was no mention of sex at all in my family.
7. Yes, my dad had two brothers and no sisters. He read almost fiction. The only fictional book that he read while I knew him was The Godfather by Mario Puzo, which he read on someone else’s recommendation. He could not get past the language. His own novel had no setting. He left every aspect of the background story vague. I found it almost impossible to read. In fact, I could not get through it.
8. Jamie moved to Birmingham AL in 1999, as is explained here.
