Day 1
Good plans go all awry. To use the wireless you need to get to the pub before it closes (11pm for those not used to UK hours). And the office at the rowing course has connectivity, you just need to actually have time to use it!
So today, first day ‘working’ was a slow start and then a very heavy afternoon. I slept late, took it nice and easy and turned up at the offices around 11.30. It was pretty easy to find where I needed to be and the people I needed to see – they’d been working full time on this for weeks and months (I first got involved in January). Found the office and found my table – covered in boxes. That all need sorted. There are piles of boxes in the back of the portacabin – filled with people’s entries, sorted by country.
The challenge was putting things together. I had 2 piles – invoices and event tickets. Each invoice had to be checked, married up with event tickets if they had ordered them and then the whole lot filed in the relative country/club box. This regatta is huge, there are around 8500 entries from around 2500 people, so getting all of this together wasa huge task.
Production line started and every 15-30 minutes a new volunteer turned up. For most, this was their first day, for many this was their first regatta. So time had to be taken to explain the whole process every single time, and then slot them in somewhere in the small space we had to sort this lot out. About 90 minutes in, the office also opened to the competitors to register. We were running about 1 day late in the preparation of the entries, so some had to wait slightly longer than planned to get themselves organised. Four hours later we were nearly done, just a few problems to sort out and the volunteers started to drift away as our only early day for the next week finished.
As I type this now, it’s 8.30am, the sun is out, there’s no wind and the lock glistens like a mirror. The office is empty and there are only a few people around the site. Won't stay like this for long!