Role-Specific Training- 23rd March 2012

Please note: These blogs have been written day-by-day. Having read this entry back after the Olympics, the level of cynicism seems over-the-top, but the transition of emotions will hopefully demonstrate my turbulent relationship with my decision to volunteer!

Hackney. It even sounds like Cockney. 

So was my fear as I navigated my way to Hackney Community College from the ludicrously overpriced RE London Hotel, Shoreditch, past the takeaway shops and scary-looking buildings. Imagine a cut-priced version of the opening section to The Sopranos, as Tony Soprano drives into New Jersey.  That was my morning. So cut-priced, in fact, that I neglected the taxi in favour of walking.

Role-specific training. I had visions of the work-training day in The Office, with endless, pointless team-building exercises, and role plays which didn’t go anywhere. As I wandered into the college, I avoided the stares of the students. ‘Foreigner’, they whispered. ‘Games maker’, they mouthed.

I may have written in my earlier blog, when I was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed that it was ‘understandable’ that LOCOG couldn’t offer any expenses to Games makers. After all, if the Daily Mail got hold of the fact that the Olympics was going even more over budget to finance students on a fortnightly work experience, life wouldn’t be worth living. Quite frankly, I’ve changed my mind. Sod the Daily Mail, I’m running out of money, travelling backwards and forwards, staying in hotels, eating London-priced food. I fully expected to have travelled the furthest out of anybody, and by that I mean Worcestershire, not the RE London Hotel, Shoreditch.

As it happens, I was pleasantly surprised. Most people I spoke to seemed to have hailed from the Midlands, Leicester, Nottingham. You know, the nonentities of this world. One girl, my age, had come from Aberdeen. I was full of admiration. But it begged the question, why have this training day in London? Take the teachers to the students! Of course, when it comes to the venue-specific training in July, this isn’t feasible. But if LOCOG insists on making this ‘not just about London’, then greater efforts should be made. It gets worse.

‘Has anyone had their invitation to collect their uniform yet?’

Silence.

‘Where do we have to go?’

‘West Ham, I heard’.

West Ham?! To collect my uniform and a laminated pass? This was getting out of hand. There are so many solutions to this. Why not courier the uniform to one of the other Games venues, the Ricoh, Old Trafford, Hampden Park? Allow us to collect our uniform on the first day? Post it out? Alas, that would be too simple. Instead, make all of us get back on our London Midland peasant-wagon and travel to East London.

Anyway, the role-specific training. It was akin to being taught ‘elf and safetee’ by a cave troll wearing a loud shirt. We got to play with ticket scanners, got told what to do if the Queen turns up unannounced (let her in but kick the DofE out), and watched endless videos with ‘comedians’ you vaguely recognised but couldn’t place. In fact, one DVD, presented by a woman, got stuck on repeat, so the cave troll yelled “I’m sick of this bird” and repeatedly smashed the DVD player. He later declared he “didn’t know any Cantonese, but [I do] know how to order a chop suey”. Wonderful insight from the man teaching us to be courteous and all-inclusive.

After being sat in Block 93 for Orientation, with the block number seemingly corresponding to the average age of the volunteer, I was genuinely pleased and relieved to meet lots of lovely people my age, who were refreshingly honest about the problems of being Games makers yet who excitedly spoke about the challenges ahead.

And so, as I strolled off into the Hackney sun, I looked forward to my own challenges. These were, a), how do you tell people to ‘move along’ in 106 different languages, and b), do I really have to go to West Ham to pick up my uniform and a laminated card?