WHAT A DAY!!!!

I got four hours sleep last night. And we have our first group of spectators to load today, meaning 40 buses more than usual. Not a good combo, I am thinking.

My van gives me a lot of trouble on the drive in today and I ponder how the resulting rise in my pulse, and blood pressure - I am sure, and the tightening in my chest along with the current of stress I feel run through my body can't be good for me. Usually if I feel all of that together once a month, that's a lot. Now I am feeling it almost daily. If this van dies on me on the freeway at 3:30 a.m. I will be beside myself. I do have BCAA now, so that is some comfort. But to be late for work is a dreadful thought. To be without a car means I will probably have to quit as there is no public transportation at this hour.

I make it there and get suited up in the usual reflective vest. I grab two flashlight wands along with my clipboard and walkie. Jessica suggests I take two walkies so I can monitor what is going on over at WOP and hear when they are sending us their overflow buses. I hope I can keep the two straight and not talk on their frequency when meaning to talk to my crew. I find out that they have two events they are loading for today and so will have over 70 buses go through. It doesn't occur to me at that moment that, again, I have been given misinformation. I will find out in a few hours that their buses will not be long gone by the time ours arrive, and the result will be a massive cluster. Blissfully unaware of this fact, I head out to greet our first bus driver.

It's Guy. The French Canadian one who is sweet on me. He tries to kiss me on the lips instead of the cheeks this morning and so I pull away and tell him no. He tries to grab me back into a hug and says he will just kiss my cheeks but I tell him "Too bad. You blew it." He pouts.

All too soon, the droves of buses from WOP start to pull into our lot and I get busy getting them parked up in the top lot and down the roadway to the right, to leave the left side for our workforce buses. I am supposed to start having five crew as of today. I have three. And only one, Shawn, is a self-starter. Soon I won't even have him as he is going to be the alternate supervisor so will work on my days off (the one Angus One hired barely speaks English and didn't show up for her first day of work. Awesome job A-One. Yet again). That's good and bad. Good because we have worked out a system together and now he will be able to maintain that on my days off so that the bus drivers and workforce will have some continuity and won't get confused. Or at least that's how it is supposed to work out, but with changes and misinformation happening constantly it is difficult to ensure any sort of consistency. Bad because I have no idea who I will put in his position. He is down on the roadway determining whether the bus coming at him next is our workforce bus, WOP overflow bus, or our spectator bus and then place it in the correct lane. It's dark out. It's raining hard. When the bus turns in, it's lights blind you so you can't read the small sign in the window - when they have a sign. They ran out down at the ever incompetent depot, so not all have them. It's a difficult job but he handles it without a hitch and so I can focus my attention elsewhere. I put one guy at the entrance to direct buses up the road, and the other at the top parking lot to park them. I have the driver log clipboard and gather information from each of our bus drivers. I don't have to bother getting info from WOP's and that's a good thing. Until I get a radio call from Jessica telling me I need to get it. I radio back and ask why I need to do that, it's WOP's job. She changes her mind and tells me just to get the bus number. It's one more thing to add to my list but at least it's just the number I need.

It's raining hard and my paper is disintegrating, despite the plastic sheet over it, and it's difficult to write. My jacket is proving not to be waterproof as I am starting to feel damp on my arms. My polar fleece gloves are soaked through. I spied some pretty skookum gloves on Doug, Richard (the big boss from Florida), and a few others the other day. They are black and bright orange with reflective strips on the backs. Why are people who are indoors at a desk job wearing those gloves while those of us outside, in the dark, directing traffic haven't been given them? Next time I see Doug, I ask him just that. He seems embarrassed a bit and says he has more in his office and will see that we get a pair each. As it should be. So far I haven't seen any come our way.

Buses for workforce have a set schedule that won't change for the entire time we are here. They arrive, or should, at half past the hour but they often arrive way too early and sometimes three hours worth at once. This is a dispatch issue. We have one that departs at 4:50, four at 5:50 (but we only ever send one to Whistler and the other three go back to the depot as we don't have that many passengers), one at 6:50, 8:50, 10:50 and 11:50. On the schedule it shows that we should be moving anywhere from 150 to 450 workforce daily. I think the most we have moved in a day is 50. We have sent buses up with one person aboard. And these Olympics are supposed to be green. Right.

I send Shawn on his break. With a Oh Henry Easter egg. I bought one for each of my team for doing such a great job yesterday.

The spectators who like to be super early have started to arrive and are waiting up top. I am still parking WOP overflow buses when our buses for the spectators start to arrive. I pull them over into the gravel parking lot as they are an hour early and the lanes up to the loading zone is blocked with WOP buses. I radio Jessica and tell her that we are starting to get WSC buses and so need to stop taking WOP's. She radios back that we have to take them. I ask her what happened to the 'circle them around the block' plan if we don't have room. She tells me that we need to bring them in and park them. They are coming in by the droves. I now have them in both lanes going up to the top, meaning that if I can't clear them before my next workforce bus arrives, I have nowhere to put him. I am super frustrated. This was not supposed to happen. I radio over to WOP and tell them I have no more room for their buses. We have over 30 of them parked here. It's a nightmare that was never. supposed. to. happen.

I am working on getting the right hand lane cleared so that I can bring up our buses when I hear a bus start up behind me. I turn around and it's one of our spectator coaches and he's starting to pull forward. I stop him and walk over to his window to ask what he's doing. He ignores me. I knock on the window and motion for him to roll it down. He does. "It's time for me to go load." he says. "I don't have the way clear for you yet. I need you to wait here." He rolls up his window and pulls out. I am pissed. I radio Jessica, who is up top with the loading crew, getting prepared. "I have a sliding center bus who is getting in the line. I tried to hold him back but he thinks he knows best." I say. As I watch him go up the road to get stuck behind WOP buses I hear more buses start up. The other sliding center drivers try to follow him but I stop them and put cones down in their path. That should hold them until I figure out what to do next. After a few moments of deep pondering, I decide to let them go and get my guy to clear the WOP buses to the right up top first. That way we can start to get our buses into position for spectators.

I then radio my guy at the entrance and tell him to direct any WOP buses to the left and ours right from now on. He radios back that he 'copies' and then lets the very next bus, which is WSC, into the left lane. God help me. He's a doctor from Nigeria, here three months. Very smart - can't comprehend English so well. I get the bus backed up and moved to the right lane and then realize that, yes it's our bus but it's an accessible bus (can take wheelchairs) and it needs to go up on the left and park off to the side up top for when we need it. Mamud was right after all. So I get the driver to back up again and put him in the WOP line up. Once he's stopped, I go up to him and apologize profusely and beg his understanding that it's our first day with all of these buses. He is really nice and is very understanding.

Eventually I get the right lane cleared so that my buses can get through. We pull our workforce buses into the gravel parking lot until I can get the left lane clear for them. It's semi-organized mayhem for the next few hours until we finally stop getting WOP buses. Then all goes like clockwork. I hate, hate, HATE that we have to take their overflow. They should have to deal with it themselves as it screws us up something terrible. And so much for our schedule never overlapping with theirs. I have to work out a solution to this before it happens again.

Shawn comes back from break and I go up top to start taking information from the spectator drivers. Buses are parked and the drivers are out, socializing. It makes it murder to get all of their information as I have to locate each driver in the order in which they are lined up. They are each on a 15 minute schedule of four buses at a time. I am supposed to make sure they are parked in the order they are scheduled but that is about the last thing I care about at the moment. They show up when they show up. If they can't keep to their schedule and show up at the right time, that's not my problem - I figure. And with only three crew instead of five, I think we are doing a pretty damn good job of this.

Most of these drivers are French Canadian. A few are from Alberta and others from various parts of the states. It's amazing to observe how the drivers in each group have similar traits and the differences between the groups. The guys from Alberta are very cordial and polite. The guys from the states are loud, brash, and either very cranky or very funny. The French Canadians are flirty and very happy. I am having such fun with them all. And I make it my mission to get a smile out of the cranky Yanks whenever I can and most of the time I succeed. I walk up to one bus and the driver opens the door. I am shocked when I see his face. He is the image of George Clooney, or what George will look like in about 15 years. I start my spiel and can't help myself. "Bonjour! Ca va?" He replies, "Bonjour! Ca va bein!" "I just need to take some information from you. I will need to get it every day and I hope you won't mind having to repeat it all of the time as I won't be able to remember everyone's info. And do you know you look just like George Clooney? Do you mind if I take a look at your accreditation tag?" He looks confused. "George Clooney" I say slowly, "you look just like him. Don't you get told that all of the time?" His face lights up. "Ahhhh. Oui. George Clooney. Yes, yes. All of the time." "I thought so." I say and then proceed to get all the info I need.

Later, when I have a bit of a breather, I see him with some other drivers jabbering away in rapid-fire French and having a laugh. I walk up to them and ask him if I can take his photo. The other drivers want to know why I want only his photo. "Because he looks like George Clooney and my friends won't believe me unless I have this picture." I say. So he poses as the other guys rib him and I get a great shot. I thank him and he smiles. He has his hands in his pockets and I reach out and take his left one out and point to his empty ring finger. "Ahhhh!" I say, "No ring. So you are a free man?" He laughs and grabs my gloved hand and feels for a ring on my wedding finger. "Ah! No ring!" he says. "Nope." I reply and walk away as they all laugh.

The rest of the day goes well and we manage to get one thousand five hundred spectators loaded and on their way to watch the luge. We still have a couple of workforce buses to load. One is in position and Patrick, the driver I went to Whistler with, comes over and asks me to speak to a passenger. Apparently she is very upset and he wants me to hear her complaint and try to calm her down. I head over with him and we board the bus. There's about 15 people on board and they all look at me. No one says anything so I say "I hear someone's not happy. Who is that?" A blond woman, about 48, to my left pipes up. "That would be me." She explains that she was turned away from the usual gate she enters in and was sent way down to the other end of the campus. When she tried to park in the workforce parking lot, the attendant wouldn't let her down the road to it and was very rude to her. She ended up parking far away and now is concerned about having to walk all that way back in the dark when she returns tonight. Another woman pipes up and says that her husband dropped her off but that he wasn't allowed into the workforce parking area either and now he has no idea where he is to pick her up tonight. Another woman says pretty much the same thing and a guy in the back is ready to quit over having to park so far away that he had to run to make the bus. The first woman wants to know why the bus at night drops them off all the way up in the top lot anyway, when all of their cars are in the gravel lot at the bottom and the bus drives right past it and then they have to walk down in the dark. I tell them that I will do everything I can to resolve this issue. That I will try to make sure that from now on they get dropped off in the workforce lot, that they can park there tomorrow, and that the rude Impark attendant is reprimanded. I sympathize with them and say that there has been so much confusion and trial and error, but that everyone is doing their best to get it worked out to everyone's satisfaction. This seems to mollify them all and they thank me.

When that bus departs, I walk down to the trailer to speak with Maq, the head of the Impark crew. It's a totally different department and company running it than ours. Jessica intercepts me on the way and asks me why I need to talk to Maq. I tell her and she says to leave it to her to deal with. I reluctantly do so, not knowing if she will remember or if the information will get passed along accurately. I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

Once all of our buses depart, including the workforce buses, I would love to have a meeting to talk about how the day went and issues we had and come up with some resolutions but that doesn't happen. Jessica does inform me that WOP was sending us all of their buses instead of using the space they have to stage them (they can load five and hold ten) because they were just too lazy to bring them in to hold them. I am ticked of to hear this and tell her that it is totally unacceptable and that it can't happen anymore. She assures me that she will talk to Doug about it and that it will be dealt with. I hope so because I don't know if I can deal with a day like today over and over again. I am not getting paid enough for that level of stress.

I go to sign out and return all of my equipment, and I check tomorrows schedule. I have two people scheduled to come in and one of them isn't Shawn. I have no idea how I am supposed to manage all those buses with just two crew. I feel like quitting.

ON THE BUSES

In bed by 6 p.m. with the alarm set for 2:30 a.m.  I have a hard time falling off to sleep but finally manage it with the aid of a humidifier and my Ocean Wave sounds on my iPod.  I wake up every hour or two though until the alarm finally goes off.

I dress in my Olympic togs and am out the door right on time at 3:15 a.m.  There's no traffic at all on the roads and all of the lights are green for me.  I zip down the freeway and pull into the parking lot for the workers right on time at 3:45.  That gives me 15 minutes before my shift starts to find out exactly what it is I am supposed to do.  I head inside the new-looking construction trailer that will be the transportation hub for the Whistler Sliding Center (WSC) office for the next three weeks.

The girl that is my manager introduces herself as Jessica.  She seems very upbeat and jolly and I am guessing in her late 20's or very early 30's.  She tells us right away that she is from the states and that her husband travels all over the world in a rock band.  She then attempts to give us some instructions but it becomes apparent almost right away that she has no idea what she is talking about and it seems that I might know more than she does.  I can't figure out how that can be but it turns out, she just got here yesterday - from the states - and hasn't had any training.  She did, however, get an orientation bus ride yesterday.... up to Whistler!  Why she would need to go up there when she, nor any of us,  will ever have to go there for the job is beyond me.  So as she stumbles around in her thought patterns, guessing at answers to our questions and seeming to make most of it up as she goes along, I try to make sense of it.  And this will prove to be the case as the day progresses and we keep getting conflicting directions and answers.  The one thing that is clear, is that one of my team's responsibilities is to get information from each bus and driver as they arrive and line up.  Stuff like the VANOC bus number, driver name and cell phone number, time scheduled to arrive and the time it actually arrived.

The other supervisor, who I will work closely with, is Olga, a Russian woman in her early 30's who's title is 'Systems Supervisor' - meaning she is in charge of loading the buses.  She has to check that each workforce member has his or her accreditation (the giant tag around the neck) and is at the correct bus hub.  There is another hub across campus that goes to Whistler Olympic Park (WOP) and we must be sure that is not where they should be.  It ends up that we get buses that belong over there, not just people.  Everyone is a bit confused, to say the least, on this first day.  It's a good thing we are transporting workforce only for the first week and a half so that we can get used to this before we have to deal with hundreds of spectators a day on top of workforce.  

I have three crew to supervise this morning; Nicole, George and Teck.  Nicole and George are young.  George is fresh from Germany.  Teck is a bit older and is Asian.  They suit up in the traffic vests and I grab two flashlight wands for Teck and two for George.  I hand the clipboard to Nicole and we head outside into the drizzling rain.  I give the three of them a quick lesson on the way to signal with the wands and then get a chance to show them as the first bus arrives.  I wave the driver in and then to the right with the wands and send Teck running up the road to help get him parked.   I leave George at the entrance to bring in other buses scheduled to arrive soon and take Nicole up to the bus to collect the information we need.   Nicole watches as I do this first bus and then I hand off the clipboard to her to continue with the task as the other buses arrive.

There's a constant flurry of instructions coming over the radio for Olga and me from Jessica back in the trailer.  A lot of it contradicts something she has said previously and I am finding it very frustrating.  It seems that nothing has been planned out thoroughly; it's more a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of thing and a lot of it is left up to us supervisors to figure out.  And there's a lot of logistical things to figure out.  But it's fun and the bus drivers are great.  They are very flirty and I will get a proposal before the day is out.  From a seventy-one year old driver who just celebrated his 50th wedding anniversary and lives in Atlanta, Georgia.  When I remind him that he's been married for fifty years, he laughs and tells me, in his southern drawl, that she's three thousand miles away so it's okay.  He's a hoot.

The first four or five drivers that come in are locals whose regular route is to Whistler so they are old hats and very confident of their jobs.  Unfortunately, we find out at the end of our shift that they thought they only had to go to one stop and so blew by about three others that they had workforce to let off at.  WOP only drops off at WOP.  Our hub, however, not only drops of at the Sliding Center, but at several others as well.  No one bothered to tell the drivers that.  When the passengers tried to tell them they should have stopped to let them off, they said "Oh no.  We just go to WSC." we find out the next morning from one of the workers.  We are not sure if Olivia should have told the drivers where they were dropping off but she makes a note to do that from now on.  It's that sort of thing that we are figuring out as we go along for not only today but for the next two days as well.

Dispatch has sent us all of our mornings buses by 5 a.m.  But they go out at 4:50, 5:50, 6:50, 8:50, 10:50 and 11:50.  The last two guys are not happy at all.  They have a long time to sit around and they got up at 2 a.m. to be here.  Also, they were thoroughly trained on the Lonsdale Key to Cypress Bowl run.  So they know exactly how to get from point A to point B over there.  They have NO idea how to get to Whistler from here, as they're from Altlanta.  Chalk up the first big blunder of many, in the next three days, by Dispatch.

The games purport to be green.  Our first bus (and they are all tour buses that seat 55 passengers) leaves with one passenger.  The second bus leaves with two.  The third leaves with six.  The fourth with four.  The fifth with eight.  The sixth with two.  Yep.  That's right.  In fact, the numbers on the schedule show that only a couple of buses were to leave with that few.  We actually have three buses that are scheduled to leave at 5:50 and there should be 130 passengers between them.  But for some reason we just aren't getting those numbers.  Most of these workers are volunteer.  I am wondering if, now they have their pretty uniforms, they have what they signed up for and don't plan to show up at all. 

It's really cold outside at night so we take turns going into the trailer to warm up.  But that's almost worse than just staying outside because once you get toasty warm and come back outside, it feels twice as cold.  I decide to stay outside unless I have to go in for a work related issue.

Nicole goes to use the bathroom.  One of three port-a-potties.  She comes back complaining that it's too dark in their to see where anything is.  We need lights inside or something to light it up until the sun rises.  Which it eventually does and is nice and sunny and warm as soon as it rises above the trees.

We are released at noon to go home, even though my hours are until 2 p.m. because there's just nothing to do now the last bus has left.  We still get paid for a full 10 hours so I am happy to leave if that's what they want.

On day two, it's rainig a lot in the morning but I stay pretty dry in my skookum jacket and snow pants.  Even my polar fleece gloves seem to repel the rain.  I am with one less crew member today as Teck was told not to come in as we really don't need four of us with so few buses coming in.  My big issue today is that there is BCIT traffic using the road we are staging the buses on, to get from the upper area to the lower area of the campus.  Even though I have signaled for them to slow down, they rarely do.  I go into the trailer and talk to the parking supervisor, Dave, about how we can make this road safer for my crew and the passengers and he radios his guys stationed at the top and bottom of the road to make sure to signal for the cars to slow.  It doesn't help.  When one guy speeds up after being signaled by a parking attendant, I step out and signal for him to stop.  He does for a second or two, and I signal with large gestures for him to slow.  He floors it around me and up the hill past my crew and some passengers.   I am furious.  I guess Jessica saw me because she calls me on my walkie and tells me that in no way shape or form am I to stop the cars.  I radio back and tell her I understand the rule but if I feel my crew or myself is in danger I WILL stop the cars.  She tells me I can't.  I repeat what I said.   About an hour later I am standing at the side of the road, watching for a bus to arrive.  I have my hood up because of the rain.  Suddenly there is a truck passing me from behind.  I never heard him until he was right beside me and it made me jump almost out of my skin.  Not two minutes later, one of my crew and one of Olga's is coming down the hill, hoods up, and a truck comes right up behind them and they don't hear it.  They continue to stroll down the road until I yell, "Watch your backs, a truck." and they jump off to the side.  They are both a bit rattled and tell me they never heard a thing.  That's it.  I have had enough of this and so I go into the trailer and tell Dave that we have to do something about the safety issue of this road.   He decides that, although we are not supposed to, he is going to cone off the road at the top and bottom, and his guys will turn cars back.  Once that is done, the stress goes right out of my day and I can concentrate on other issues.

The rain tapers off but there's no sunshine today as the clouds are thick overhead, so we stay cold pretty much the whole day.

We have more passengers today, but still nothing like the numbers we have on our schedule.    And I get to go home early again.  I could get used to this.

On morning three I get there at 3:45 to see two buses in the parking lot beside the trailer.  It's meant for workforce vehicles.  I go into the trailer and find out that one bus was here overnight and the driver slept in his bus.   Strange.  Olga and I are also told that the schedule has been changed.  Instead of leaving at 50 minutes past the hour, they will now leave at half-past.  So 20 minutes early.  We soon find out that it seems no one bothered to pass this information on to the workforce members and they are not arriving in time for the change so the bus leaves without them.  They are unhappy, to say the least.  This is typical of everything I have experienced so far with these games.  The left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing most of the time.

Shawn and Mamud have replaced Nicole and George today.  So I have to train them with the light wands and the radio.  They are super smart and get it right away.  Turns out Shawn is some CEO of a company and Mamud is a doctor from Nigeria.  They are here just for the experience of working at the Olympics.  It's not the first time I have felt that the people who have applied to work at these games are not being utilized to their full abilities.  Olga speaks fluent Russian, for petes sakes.  Why is she moving passengers onto buses?  Shouldn't she be the guest services for the Russian delegation, at the very least?  Or maybe translator?  I just shake my head.  I know I should be doing something more than moving buses about, that's for sure.

We have a lot more passengers today.  Still not the numbers on the schedule but a lot more than either of the days before.  It turns out that most of them showed up the other two days but had no idea where to go because there is no signage, waited around where they thought the bus would be, and then went home when it didn't show.  I don't know if there is supposed to be signs and they just haven't arrived yet.  None of the signs I know we need for the spectator boarding areas have arrived.  So maybe there's more that points the way to us for the workers that are coming as well.  I don't know.   But we have a lot of very frustrated people arriving out of breath, after having run over from some distant point, just to discover that their bus departed 20 minutes early today.  

Olivia gets the directive to keep the old scheduled time for the 10:50 and 11:50 buses.  It seems that the order to leave early was another screw up by Dispatch and should never have happened.  So all those people who left on the other buses plan to show up 20 minutes early tomorrow.  I am glad I am not working tomorrow because they are going to be furious.  I am sure of it.

I spend some time today writing out everything I have worked out for my crew.  I have numbered each position, written down a description of that position's duties, and worked out a solution to a huge problem of how to park buses that may need to get out before the others ahead of them, including an 'accessible' bus - for wheelchair bound people.   We only get a couple of those a day, once the spectators start to arrive, and so I had to come up with a way to set it aside while dealing with our other buses  AND overflow buses from WOP which are supposed to park in our area.  This has been a nightmare for me to try to figure out and today I tell Jessica that I don't believe we can accommodate them.  They will have to stick with the original plan, which was for them to circle the block until there IS room over there.  Otherwise it's a logistical nightmare.  I have no idea, when the bus pulls into the lot, whether he is ours or theirs and thus where to put him.  Once he's parked in a line, others will come up behind and then he can't be moved.  If we have two lines, one ours and one theirs,  and take up the whole narrow road, I can't get the accessible bus through.  And how do I know which line to put which bus in anyway because, as I said, I can't tell when they pull in, who's they are.  So I don't want WOP buses in our lot.  I hope she can work that out.

It was very cold this morning when I got out to my car; I had to scrape a thin layer of ice off of the windows.  It is by far the coldest morning we've had of the three.  Despite having added a turtle neck sweater to my three layers of Olympic togs, I am freezing cold.  I spend a lot more time in the trailer today.  But eventually the sun comes up and it gets nice and warm again.

Olga and I let our crew go early again but we stay behind to get into a golf cart with Jessica and tour the top lot where we will load spectators and suss out the area and potential issues.  We come up with positions for each of Olga's crew and work through a few other kinks.  We sign out at just after 2:00 p.m. and I am ready for my four days off.

As I write this blog, my phone rings.  It's Jessica.  Tomorrow's staging supervisor, who hasn't worked yet, just called to say she won't be coming in.  Can I come in?  I say yes.  So no day off for me just yet.  And tomorrow is going to be 'fun'.  The parking lot is used by a church for overflow parking and hundreds of cars will be using the road we blocked off for the past couple of days.  Oh joy!!  But the parking lot attendants will use it as practice for the flood of vehicles we expect to get once spectators arrive and I am glad for the extra hours.  It turns out that with my new schedule of four days on and four off, all but one week I will only get 30 hours.  That coupled with the pay reduction, I won't be making anywhere near what I first thought I would when I was hired by the agency back in October.

Olga With Dan, One of Her Crew

Post Script: Can I just say how much I HATE the new Blogger and how it totally screws up where I want to place the pictures? I have fiddled around with this post for over an hour to try to get them right and I can't do it. I must leave it as is as I have to get to bed for my early rise tomorrow.