Item 1: I am getting a cold and am VERY UNHAPPY ABOUT IT. I just got over a cold right before my volunteer shifts started and am not eager for a repeat performance. I am taking a lot of pills and drinking a lot of liquids. Pray for me!
Item 2: No “getting a cold” was going to stop me from pulling on pants and dragging the dog across the street to see STEPHEN COLBERT LIVE!! Wooooo! He was very funny. Here are some photos I took before the dog got bitchy and we had to skeddaddle.
The crowd!
My building!
Colbert’s set
Colbert!!!
Okay. You saw him. Can we go?
Item 3: I guess there was some controversy around the cauldron downtown and how the chainlink fence around it prevented people from taking good photos and generally Olympic Spiriting the hell out of the cauldron. So VANOC organizers moved some of the fence much closer, opened up an eye-level hole in the fence and also opened a rooftop viewing area nearby for people to take pictures.
All they needed to make the spectator/cauldron interaction complete was a team of blue-jacketed volunteers to answer questions like “How long is the line for the rooftop view of cauldron?” Why can’t my three year old climb the cauldron?” and “Do you want to see the cauldron in my pants?” – and we have answered the call. So Friday night, I was the Team Leader of the Cauldron Smurfs.
Working outside with the public is a lot different than working inside at the Westin. Firstly, there are a lot more people. Like, 300,000 more. Secondly, the public has different questions than the Westin IOC guests – for example, no one at the Westin has ever asked me angrily “Where are the mascots??”, like they expected me to produce them from my magic Olympic rectum. Thirdly, at the Westin, I have never had to:
1) Call 911 and ask tourists not to take photos of a guy who was bleeding a lot
2) Locate a missing child using a megaphone and a lifeguard chair
3) Comfort a weeping tourist whose wallet had just been stolen
4) Wander through a shipping yard trying to find an elevator so that an elderly woman in a scooter who was stranded on the sea wall could avoid being carried up 8 flights of stairs
5) Have a police officer intervene when some drunk young men’s “questions” about the cauldron got weirdly aggressive
It was probably the fastest shift I ever worked – and since they’ve managed to pull together a permanent crew over there, I probably won’t need to work there again. But hey – at the end of my ten hour shift, I got a photo of the cauldron! Jealous??
