The second thing I'd like bring up again is the notion of professionalism. Just to clarify, I wasn't not debating the point of whether or not I was a professional quizbowl player, but whether or not I was acting in a professional manner (the fact that the word is both a noun and an adjective apparently led to some confusion in earlier messages). There seems to be a perception on the circuit that ACF is an group of evil people who make cats box for beer money, throw babies down wells for kicks, and forward all of their emails to /dev/null, while NAQT is a warm-and-fuzzy "class act" whose members would walk 10 miles in the snow to fix a repeat and volunteer their free time to read tossups at nursing homes. Although there are plenty of genuinely nice people associated with NAQT (and even one or two at ACF), there are also plenty who, before NAQT was formed, would have had no compunction telling a rabid ACF'er to screw off during a heated flame war. I'm sure at least a few people at NAQT would like to tell me where I can shove it. Why don't they? Because everyone at NAQT is such a class act? Perhaps, but very unlikely. The real reason is probably because NAQT has much more risk in letting its members say such things publicly. NAQT is a corporation, and ACF is not. NAQT sells questions to high school teams, and high school coaches are notoriously unappreciative of such antics. This is pure speculation, but NAQT probably has an internal policy of keeping public disparaging of anyone to a minimum, _whether speaking as an NAQT representative or not_. This type of agreement is standard at many companies, and is a wise idea. As I mentioned earlier, ACF and NAQT have different goals. Besides, ACF is not as bad in the customer service department as it is made out to be. A lot of the problems that happened at Nationals were beyond the control of either ACF or the Michigan team, and Subash addressed the other concerns in a hopefully acceptable manner. Just don't be surprised if you don't get an immediate reply when you ask the head editor a question a week before the tournament. He is probably swamped with a bunch of other emails, and the whole editing thing. So, the point of this rambling is, don't take everything at face value. Don't judge either organization solely on their outward appearance and what people tell you. Dave (not speaking as a representative of ACF or the MAQT)
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