[Sperkowsky]

Originally Posted by evanperryg

Why? Seems frivolous outside of a strategist making observations.

Anyway, more on topic:
We've saved seats. Thursday morning at Archimedes, we had a bus of 60-something kids get caught in nasty traffic, and it was nearly an hour and a half behind. We marked out an area with people and scouting items, and explained our situation calmly and graciously to other teams. They understood, and were happy to oblige. There was one team who needed a few seats for scouters, and we gladly gave them the 8 seats they needed. It wasn't a problem for us, I ended up talking to them for quite a while and learned a lot about them. Did we "break the rules?" Yeah, I guess. Does it matter? Not at all, because it was handled professionally by us, and the teams around us. They were very understanding of our situation, and we were understanding of their situation. When people are nice to each other, they don't necessarily need rules to guide their behavior.

TL;dr: If we were all graciously professional to each other, this whole thing would work a lot better.

Where your post differs from a lot of others is you allowed the 8 scouts to sit there. There is a big difference between saying that that seat is reserved and asking if you could keep that seat.