This morning as we waited to get our 2nd Part Passes to enter the venue two of our guys were speaking in French, then Charles turned to Jan, a Czech, and asked if "glowing" was the same thing as "shiny" (the motto of the 2010 Vancouver Games is "with glowing hearts"). After thinking for just a moment, Jan explained that "glowing" was like light coming from within, whereas "shiny" was reflected light. I turned to Jan and told him that I was impressed with his explanation, and that I didn't think I could have put it that well. Language has always fascinated me, so it was interesting to see how a non-native English speaker conceptualized vocabulary that is second-nature to me.
Later that day a woman from VANOC Transportation came by the office to explain some ice concerns she was having and wanted us to take care of. She was quite chatty, and started talking about the raccoons and coyotes. Then she launched into a thing about bears coming out of hibernating. My favorite line was when she said "If I can smell the earth, the bears have been out for 2-3 weeks". Oh, how I love Canada!
Holly and I got to see a couple of women practicing on the luge track today! Before our lunch break we went up to the track lodge to use the "flushies" (flush toilets) and we heard announcements about the practice beginning. Unfortunately, both of us had neglected to bring our cameras, and my phone was not quick enough to catch the athletes. We went up after our shift, but when we got there a Romanian woman had been knocked out. She was going around Turn 16, the "Dog Bone", and went up over the lip. They had to take her out in a stretcher - I'm going to be checking the news to see if she's okay.
Medical personnel assisting the injured athlete
Our main entertainment for the day was a call I took that I didn't even think was that funny until everyone started freaking out about it. A woman called to tell me "there's an apple core in the waterfall". She said she tried to get it out but didn't want to fall in, and asked that we get the 'nipple grabbers' to get it out. I wrote down all the info, and as per protocol I repeated the information to ensure accuracy. When I got off the call a guy who works in the other half of our trailer poked his head in and said "Did that really just happen?!"
Holly 10-4'ed (radioed) Whitney, who is up at Men's Start where the waterfall is, and asked her to take care of it as our venue manager Scott came in and everyone cracked up laughing. Whitney 10-4'ed back a few minutes later and in a mock-serious voice informed us that the apple core had successfully been removed from the waterfall. As a joke, we logged the issue as high priority, and made wise-cracks about it the rest of the day.
This is the waterfall up behind Men's Start
Nipple-grabbers, in case you were wondering, are mechanical claws on sticks used to pick up trash. I model them, as well as some other gear we had laying around, here below:
Cleanevent ran out of anything smaller than an X-Large in all parts of our uniform, so my coat swallows me.
Wondering about the title? That one is courtesy of Jono, the hyper Australian supervisor. At the end of the day he and Scott were looking over the roster for tomorrow and they were noting the new additions to our team. They try to strategically assign people to the different areas, and Jono made a comment that "these new people could be bars of soap for all we know!". I found it hilarious, but I guess it's no different than our expression "dumb as rocks".
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