Post-Special Olympics Reflections

As promised, I feel the need to go back and reflect a little on my time with the Special Olympics Winter Games. I had a very and creative nice blurb-poem-like-thing that I had given to our project write-up, but the good people at blogspot won't let me post it. That is, I've been having technical difficulties pasting the thing from my word document, so prose it is.

To give you a quick synopsis, the two weeks of the even were by far the most intense of my life: frustrating, , exhausting, fast-paced, sleep-deprived. I could only compare it to all of the finals weeks from college shoved into 16 days. I spent much of my time dealing with angry coaches, commissioners, and volunteers, staff members, and often a very flustered hotel manager or two.
I put my body through running on room temperature cold-cut sandwiches and caffeine for most meals, and I averaged about 4-5 hours of sleep a day.

At the same time the experience was incredibly exhilarating, touching, hilarious, and fun. To be responsible for the welfare of so many people really gives you a jolt of energy when a crisis comes up that you didn't know you had in reserve. And when the tough times hit, you learn to rely on the people around you and approach things with a sense of humor. My fellow Corps Members in Accommodations David and Christa along with my awesome bosses Wade and Tanya kept each other sane with humor through long nights at the Main Area Command as we planned out the movements of the massive amounts of athletes, coaches, heads of delegations, delegate assistant liaisons, unified partners, team staff members, Special Olympics staff members, sports officials, bus drivers, production teams, webcasters, media reps, venue builders, etc.

Humor is a must. Like I said, it's what keeps you from going nuts. I want to give a particular story that I think is relevant. The night before opening ceremonies was chaos. We were transitioning from the 'Host Town' program that was run by delegation services and not us, so we were dealing with a lapse of information at times and a boatload of problems to cover. All the athletes and coaches had been staying in different hotels or with host families, and they were all moving back into the Boise area to go to Opening Ceremonies the next day and then split off to their separate venues. This led to lost luggage, athletes and coaches at the wrong hotels, and a myriad of other problems. I think what was particularly bothering me was a large population of bus drivers that didn't want to sleep two-to-a-room like their contract dictated.

Bus drivers, by-the-way, are Prima Donnas. Not to say that there aren't some naturally good-natured bus drivers out there because I ran into some, but a large enough popluation of them acted badly enough for me to lump them all in a category somewhere above child pornographers and below tax-evaders. I hope that there's a circle of hell set aside for selfish bus drivers, right alongside greedy mortgage speculators. But I digress...

So all the troubles had been building up for me by that evening. I was angry and disappointed with other departments. I was hungry and tired and had hours of work ahead of me. Then as I was running off to confront another concern, my copartner in Boise hotels with Accommodations-- Christa-- let me know that at one of her hotels a certain delegation had racked up $350 dollars in charges on their room for adult entertainment and another $50 for smoking in the room. I about lost it. I think I couldn't stop laughing for a good 5 minutes, and couldn't help but giggle from then on out when I saw that delegation at competitions.

Another great thing about the Games was that it was a real trial by fire for my character. I know that I can push myself that hard and still succeed. Having worked 184 hours in two weeks is going to make projects from here on out seem like a breeze. I have depths of patience that I didn't know I had-- I've learned the golden phrase of PR, "I'm sorry, I don't know the answer for that right now, but I will find out shortly." I've always been a bit apprehensive with phone communication since you can have a real-time conversation but not look a person in the eye. Now I'm not afraid to talk to anyone on the phone and understand that it's probably the best way to get ahold of someone and get the information that you need. It's a small revelation, I know, but it was a powerful one in my situation.

Lastly, I wanted to share two of the best memories I had from the Games. They both happened on the Closing Ceremonies day, which was my favorite out of the 16. The few nights previous, we had planned out the hotel moves and the departure plans for all the delegations and had some extra time during the day. Wade and Tanya took the opportunity to take Christa, David, and me to a few of the competitions. David got to see his Korean delegation win a floor hockey game, and we all watched the medal ceremony for one fo the FH divisions. The gold metal team was Isle of Man (an island between Britain and Ireland). They lined up on a podium to great applause, and each was draped individually down the line with their gold metal. Second in line was a girl who was absolutely extatic to be were she was. She was crying and throwing up her arms and dancing around. It was hard for anyone watching not to get a little misty. It was my first big "Oh yeah, that's what we've been doing this for" moment.

My second came that evening. To give some background, earlier in the week David, Christa, and I had attended the Head of Delegation meetings that happen every morning bright and early at 7:00. We had been gathering correct flight information for departures and on that morning were giving out updated hotel placements for that evening. Some of the delegations reacted pretty reluctantly. Uruguay had this little old lady who had a lot of spunk for an HOD, and she was not too excited to see that her hotel had been changed. She didn't speak any English, but she was very insistant with her translator that this was something she was not happy about. This was nothing new for me.

As a member of the Operations Team, our victories are under the radar. That is, you never know we are there until something goes wrong. We get very little positive feedback for when things go right, but plenty of negative when things don't. As a result it gives you a bit of a thick skin. By the end of the day, I had moved on and mostly forgotten about the incedent.

Our last big job of that day was to assist Transportation with getting everyone back to their hotels for the night after closing ceremonies. The job was one of the biggest for the Transportation department and as usual it looked like a monstrocity. There were double-digit amounts of busses in about 8 rows: all going to different places in the treasure valley. The trick was to find which delegations went to which hotels and match the right one in the army of busses lined up. I would describe it as a good mix of real-life tetris and frogger.

Well I got there and I was almost no help to anyone. I would run up and down the isles of busses as the multiple delegations that sent me to look waited out in the cold. I would occasionally find a correct bus match-up and find that the delegation that I had been looking for had already left with another runner. My one big victory happened with Uruguay. That little-old-lady of an HOD came up to me and grabbed my arm and with a very desperate gaze into my eyes, like I had to save her team from drowning. She said something around the lines of, "You find bus. You help us please." After a few more minutes of searching, I found a bus that was unassigned. It was kind of a double victory for me. I got to use what authority I had to tell the bus driver where to go and what to do, and I saved the day for a very cold delegation with their home somewhere in the subtropics. So this HOD that had earlier that day been pretty sour at the fruits of my labor came right up to me before getting on the bus and planted two sloppy kisses on my cheeks and gave me a very thankful embrace. That was the big "Oh yeah" moment I'll take away.

Well I said in a previous post that I wasn't sure if I'd get much out of the project. This was while we were in the midst of the worst office work that we had, and we saw almost no correlation between the hours we put in and the results they brought. I can definately say now that I'm looking back, what I did made a difference. I am very proud to have been a part of the project, and I would be a part of it again in a heartbeat. But not right now. I'm still recovering.