Ah - but do they use shutters?
Some years ago I watched NTD Harry Sabine pair a 200+ player section of a national scholastic (JHS in Memphis, I think), he did it without laying the cards out on a huge table, too.
I do have my concerns that newer TDs know too little about pairing, I wonder if the scores for TD exams reflect that?
(If we had online TD exams, information about which questions get missed the most would be readily available.)
Might lead us to more readily understand which questions were poorly worded, also.
I still pair using pairing cards. In a 16 to 40 player event, it is not hard. I have trained a few kids and adults to be TDs through a simulation that requires that they know all of the details of managing a tournament as an organizer to directing and being able to submit a final rating report. They learn pairing tricks, keep wallcharts updated so that the players and spectators can see what is going on during the round, and double check for errors through redundancy methods. In the end, they can run a tournament from one large manila envelope, like I do, without needing to lug around a computer, printer, extra print cartridges, cords, and a lot of other stuff.
Since I do no online banking, for good reasons I do not want to go into, I mail in rating reports of tournaments I direct for our club. If I could just send a check, I would do the rating reports online as our club’s events would not take that much time to enter. It really does not matter much to me how quickly the events get rated. The office could rate them after depositing the check. I have told all and sundry at our events to be patient. Whether it takes hours, a day, or a week or so to find out a rating, it is fine. Patience is better for a player than instant gratification. It would be better if they read the Rulebook than know what their rating(s) are.
If one has to have submitted reports online, then there is no point in taking the Senior TD exam, which friends of mine have urged me to do, given my experience in organizing and running events both large and small for over 45 years. At one time, I had SrTD status, but life got in the way and I did not know that it had lapsed or even that the status could lapse; rules changed in the interim. Why the USCF failed to “grandfather” in many TDs who have served their local communities and the USCF as a whole for decades is a mystery. Have already been there and done that for 150+ player state championship tournaments, Grand Prix tournaments, chess leagues, team tournaments, round robins, and even events that allowed computers to play as well as being a Floor TD at several national events, including two Supernationals and a US Open. You learn a lot at these national events, which I have incorporated in how I organize and do things. I also learned what not to do. There is a lot you can learn from the kids, too, about what makes a better event.
I did try to take a SrTD test several years ago. The test I was e-mailed had a pairing section that was made up of print dingbats and impossible to do. Lack of compatibility with my version Word was likely the problem. No accommodations for that were made. Several of the test questions were obsolete, too. It appeared that several of my explanations with citations for questions where none of the given answer options were adequate were rejected as well with no feedback why. I don’t want to go through the process again unless I receive a mailed copy of the test and reasons why answers are rejected. Since the goal posts seem to have been moved again and now require having done online submissions of rating reports, there is little reason to request the exam. IMHO, the USCF has not been very respectful of its LTDs and makes it too hard to move up with complicated eligibility rules that are designed for top level scholastic tournaments and the few Open style events it runs which have less relation to local and regional organizing. The federation is going to run into a problem as the TD corps ages out and disappears in the next decade. There are too few who will be able to replace them. Very likely I will be out of being a TD in a couple of years, so on a personal level any change of TD status doesn’t matter. The problem of succession of leadership and expertise for all organizations is critical, especially in a non-profit that relies so heavily on volunteers. I do not see it being addressed except to make it more difficult. Good luck.
It is certainly possible to upload an event using the online interface and get it ready for submission, then mail the office a check, using the online interface to compute the ratings fee due.
However, the office won’t release the event for rating until the check is received.
In the original design for TD/A, we were going to have deposit accounts so that organizers could send funds to the office and use them to pay for memberships and rating reports submitted online. However, our CFO at the time raised some concerns about holding those funds on deposit and the auditors echoed his concerns, so the project was shelved.
Should those objecctions be overcome, it would not take a lot of work fo finish the programming for that, as most of the mechanism is in place. (In fact, it’s used by the backroom TD for national events run by the national office.)