The US Class Championship is coming up in July, in Boca Raton, Florida. It's only about a 20 minute drive from where I live, so I'll definitely play in it, probably playing up in the class A section.

Anyone else considering coming down for it? This might be your chance at a national championship!

--Fromper

Good luck

So I emailed the TD today to withdraw my early entry on this one. I'll be too busy... 3 miles away... working my tail off at work for a project that's absolutely guaranteed to fail miserably no matter how much overtime I spend on it. But if I don't at least put in a major effort to make it succeed, I'll get fired. Whereas, if I put in the effort, and it still fails, it's less likely that I'll be the one blamed for the failure, so I'll probably still have a job afterward. I'm not entirely convinced it's worth it. I'm thinking working on my resume might be more worthwhile than working on this project.

--Fromper

Sorry to hear about your predicament. Do you work in I.T.?

I've been a Systems Analyst/Programmer and a project manager for the past 6 years. I know how you feel and have seen my fair share of failures regardless of how much work I put into them. I could rant on this subject for ever, but this is a chess forum so I'll leave it at that.

I'm also in the same boat as you are, I have been trying to go to the Ye Olde Pueblo chess tournament here for 2 years strait but will have to give it a miss this time around again because of work.

Good Luck and take it easy.

So I missed the tourney last weekend, only to have management tell me a week later that they pushed the deadline on my project back a month.

So if I'd known that in advance, I could have skipped work for the weekend and played in the tourney without it hurting the project. Given that I'd asked my boss a month in advance for that weekend off, and it now sounds like he knew they would push the deadline before that weekend happened, I'm kind of upset that I wasn't able to play.

And yes, I'm in IT. We're installing a new ERP system where I work, which is the type of project that should have taken a year or more, given our size and the amount of customization we're doing to the system, but we're trying to do it in half that time. Given how much overtime everyone's been putting in for the last month, I think the extra month may actually be enough time to make the project succeed... barely.

So I'm not sure when I'm going to have time to play chess again. I've been too busy to even look at anything chess related for nearly a month now, and it's not likely to let up any time soon.

--Fromper