Photo of me and box office staff outside our little trailer in the woods!
Well, my Olympic adventure has taken quite a turn.... the work part of it ended for me last Sunday when we both mutually agreed I was in quite over my head... after working just 4 days of 4:30 am to 8pm days in a tiny trailer in the wilderness working on a ticketing program I knew nothing about, the charm of it all vanished. I can't say that any of that was fun. It didn't seem to bother the other hired staff as much as me that we had had no hands on training on the ticketing software and yet they expected us to oversee huge venues and 5 employees who themselves had had only 1 day of training. Which was 1 more day than I had! After 4 exhausting days (why I never had time to blog) and still not knowing the system (I hadn't had even a moment to look at venue maps), still not being able to master the new cell phone or new email account, no one around who knew anything about the charge card machine for Visa (no mastercard allowed and would you believe we had to do an offline Visa sale instead of feeding charge directly into the system -- even Kennedy Theatre can feed in directly!) -- like the password to do refunds, a safe with no combination, no one who could tell me where to drop the thousands of dollars in cash, no office supplies til the second day, including pens to sign charge card slips!, no place to eat and no time to eat anyway, outdoor porta potties in the winter cold, it just wasn't worth it. The rest of the box office staff who was there, didn't appear to know any more than I did once I had even a minute to ask them, but I think their experiences with much larger venues than KT and large scale events makes you hardened so that nothing bothers you and you just learn to wing it! I wanted to be assured I was doing the right thing. This was the Olympics after all! Being at the Whistler Olympic Park which was 40 minutes outside of Whistler with 3 totally separate venues each holding around 12,000 folks was way more than I was ready for.
So since I was here anyway, I took the opportunity to go see some things. I wouldn't have gotten to otherwise. (We had an event every single day from Feb 12 - 28.) And as we know there are always tickets around, aren't there? So I saw luge, downhill, and some figure skating... that part has now been fun. Finding a place to stay in Vancouver, not so fun... Luckily Julie Iezzi had thought to pass me the phone number for a student from 6 years ago, Colleen Lanki, who agreed to let me sleep at her place for two nights when I called her completely out of the blue. I leave on Friday for Denver and will post more later about my true Olympic adventure and the exciting events I did get to see!
I will eventually post a day by day accounting of the ticketing adventure but not many of you will be terribly interested. Do check back and read about the fun of GOING to the Olympics! Aloha.
