Saturday 1 September 2012

Paralympics Day 3 - Here come the crowds!

Day 3 at the Paralympics was the busiest yet and probably the busiest of the whole games. All the activities are running, and we expected well over 100,000 in the park.

The perfect day then to be rostered onto the busiest entrance point, Stratford Gate. From opening time at 7:30am through to the end of my shift at 3pm there were people coming through. Sometimes it was only a slow stream of maybe 1 or 2 people a minute through to the peak periods when we had between 15-25 people a minute. In the first fifteen minutes I scanned more tickets than I did in three hours at Victoria Gate yesterday.

Because we were solidly working from 7:30-11:30am we missed out on breakfast, so when we got to eat lunch it was consumed in seconds!

The best part of today was being paired with Stuart the guy I met on the first morning. We have a similar sense of humour and we get on like a house on fire. As in all things in life people are what make things special and in this regard and in his own words Stuart is "awesome".

I did have one complaint today though. Occassionally people would come through the security check think they were done and start striding into the park. We would have to stop them and scan their tickets, usually this was all fine. On one occassion a couple of women were rushing past us and as well as saying "Excuse me" I, with one finger, touched one of the women on the arm to attract her attention. She duely gave me her tickets and then said that I didn't have to push her to get her attention! I did the right thing and apologised for my action, scanned her tickets and wished her a great day. I probably scanned 500+ tickets so having one tetchy person out of over 500 is a pretty good ratio.

So where to tomorrow? I have been on green, red, yellow and blue teams with black, pink and orange still to try (I could get red as it isn't marked on my card even though I have done it).
What colour do you think I will get? If you guess correctly then you will get big bonus points towards my paralympic souviner competition.

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2 comments:

  1. Enjoying the return of the blog. Liking the audience participation - it's a bit like guessing Alberto the frog's choice of milkshake.... tomorrow I think you'll be on pink.....
    Have fun. Might see you on Thursday when I'm in for the morning athletics session with the parentage.

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  2. PS The lady was probably very excited to be there or "late" and not thinking. I would probably have got grumpy with her so you did admirably. Yesterday one of the gamesmakers was so amazingly helpful offering to take us round the other side of the venue on her break to help us find a seat. You and the rest of the crew are definitely making the games. Awesome!

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