Changing movements

My technical director skills were put to the test today. Started with a 6.5 table Mitchell, and about 20 minutes into the game one pair (not the pair that was sitting out first) has a medical emergency and has to leave. How do you reorganize the game?

One simple solution would be to put a 5th board on each table and play a 5x5 skip Mitchell. The would mean only 25 boards and the board sets would be 1-4 and 29, 5-8 and 30, etc... Plus 6 table Mitchells bother me. 6.5 or 7 table Mitchells bother me, too, but the Macon club doesn't have guide cards for the 9x3 3/4 7 table Howell (only the 13x2 which isn't good for the amount of crippled people here. The pair opposing the pair that left would play the pair sitting out and probably get 2 or 3 no plays for the first round but mainly this is just a terrible movement as far as fairness is concerned. Another option is to set up a relay and play 6x4 Mitchell. One set of boards would inevitably be out of order and people would complain about not playing enough boards - most would play 24 but one or two only 20. And I'm certainly not running a 6x5 game for a 30 board session that would keep us here close to 4 hours. The third option (and the one I chose) was to change to a 9x3 Howell. Since most tables had played the first 3 of each 4 board set, I had everyone move for round 2 according to the guide cards and I personally moved the boards until i got the bridgemates reconfigured to show the correct boards. For this option, boards with west dealer wouldn't get played because I was pretty much forced into using board sets 1-3, 5-7, 9-11, etc. and having a board set of 4,8,12 seems silly. For about 10 minutes, everyone except me was confused but they continued to play without interruption and all was fine. It's 2 hours 10 minutes after we started and now moving into round 7 so right on time with only one NP. I think this was the most difficult of the 3 options I considered but definitely allowed for the best game once people got over the wacky board sequences. Thankfully the bridgemates are good at knowing which boards to expect because they're way off from the printed guide cards.So while the whole room was confused and complaining a couple of hours ago, now they are impressed at how well it all worked out with no delay.