Wednesday March 10th

One and half weeks to go!! It seems to be going by slow at the moment but when I look back I cannot believe two months have passed of me being in Whistler. These past few days have been slow as I mentioned in the down days between the Olympics and Paralympics. I have begun to see some of the athletes for the Paralympics around the venue that are practicing on the mountain. I have seen people were jackets from Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy and the United States just to name a few. Lexi is back from her days off and is helping me at the helpdesk today. As it has been the past couple days, helpdesk calls have been at a minimum which has given both Lexi and I the chance to get out on the venue and help out where we are needed. This morning I helped to take inventory of all the things we used up during the Olympics. This included hand sanitizer, toilet bowl cleaner, toilet paper, paper towels and a few other things. Later on in the day Kylie and I went over to the sliding center and picked up whatever leftovers of these supplies they may have as they are in the process of cleaning up and emptying everything out. The Sliding Center, where the luge, skeleton and bobsledding events were held was only an Olympic Venue and will not be used for the Paralympics. This means a lot of the temporary infrastructure put in place is being torn down as well as all the companies working on site are in the process of moving out. Kylie and I were able to get all the toilet paper rolls we needed for the Paralympics from the Sliding Center as well as most of the paper towels and a some of the toilet bowl cleaner. After subtracting what we were able to get from the sliding center I sent a list to Hughie for what needed to be ordered/brought in by the weekend for the upcoming games. This process should have been done a few days earlier but we had enough of all our supplies to get through the first few event days and the delivery time for the rest was only one to two days after it was ordered. Kylie and I went to the Sliding Center earlier today with Clean Event's venue manager for that site, Scott Parnell. Out of the seven venues Clean Event was in charge of during the Olympic games, Scott was the only American venue manager. I had briefly met him before but this was the first time I had actually gotten to know him. His job title was Venue Manager for the Whistler Sliding Center and he was in charge of supervising the cleaning, snow removal and waste at this venue. Clean Event is in charge of all the waste, cleaning all areas except the food tents, and removing the snow from all steps, landings and one meter outside of these. Scott said he had a staff of about 16 on event days and they would arrive five hours before the event started and stayed on average three hours after. His main responsibilities were overseeing that people were doing the jobs they were assigned in a timely manner and that his staff was getting along with the other workers and spectators on-site. The high profile areas were his main concern, for example the athlete lounge and the Olympic family lounge needed to be clean at all times. The rest of the site would need a general clean and dump of all waste once each day. As far as his favorite parts of the job go, Scott said he enjoyed event management because of all the experiences hes had at big sporting events across the world and he loves meeting people. His least favorite parts are the time away from his family and the long hours he has to work a lot of the time but added he would rather be spending time out at venues because the work is always different versus spending less hours at a desk all day. He told me he was from Tampa, Florida and traveled some with Clean Event but did most of their events inside the United States. He had been in Whistler about the same amount of time I had, arriving in early January but was due to fly out tomorrow morning. Scott told me he really missed his wife and two daughters and was looking forward to seeing them. The events he told me worked for Clean Event in the United States were the U.S. Open, an arrangement of festivals and mostly Nascar Races. He said he did a good amount of traveling but a lot of it was inside the south eastern United States and he enjoyed it. Since I have been in Whistler I met one other guy who said he worked many of the Nascar races for Cleanevent. His name is Sam and he is from Seattle, the opposite corner of the United States from Florida. Just yesterday he told me would get to head home for a week after the Paralympics and would then be off to Nashville to start work with a series of Nascar races. Although I have made many great contacts inside Clean Event and at my work venue, these two guys seemed to be more helpful because most of their work is closer to home for me than say somewhere in the United Kingdom or in Australia. I have loved the opportunity to be in another country and at such a global event, but I have decided I would rather make this an occasional thing if possible rather than spent my entire year traveling the world when I graduate from school. I do still think I would life to find a job in event management but maybe one closer to home and I like the idea of working at an Arena possibly. I am considering this because different events would take place at Arena but the traveling would be less.