“Where are you going for Canada Day?” someone asked me.

“I am going to Canada,” was my flip response. I was going to be at Waterloo in Waterloo and have a busy holiday weekend.

I worked until midnight on Friday. I got up at 8:00 Saturday morning and helped setup at Columbia Lake fields. We finished in the evening on Saturday and waited for security people to come at 20:00 to watch the setup overnight.

Sunday, on Canada Day, I came at 9:00 and we worked until 1:30 Monday morning. I was back at the fields with everyone at 8:20 — only a few hours after we had left — and worked until 14:00 before going to my house to change for paid work at 3:30.

So that was my Canada weekend. How was it? Great.

Giving directions

While we were picking up equipment and supplies on Saturday Mariano called Hiro to ask for directions because they were stuck in traffic on the Mac-Cart Freeway. Hiro said, “I’ll pass you to Ryan, also known as the Human GPS.” Luckily I knew exactly where they were and gave them the exit number and distances they needed to go.

Kid and the kangaroo

Earlier on the day I was driving some equipment to the main stage and a woman came up with her young six-year-old son. She said her son was disappointed that he couldn’t climb on the climbing wall because of the age requirement and asked whether children were allowed to climb on the scouts ropes structure.

“That is just for demonstration; only scouts can climb it.” The boy was disappointed.

“But you should go check out the petting zoo down there. They have a kangaroo,” I added.

The kid’s eyes went wide and he ran and climbed up into the golf cart and hugged me around the neck.

That was pretty funny.

Serving food

I mostly helped with operations, connected resources with needs, With all the different things happening for tesn of thousands of people, it is variedd and can get hectic. At one point later in the afternoon, I was asked to help in the food tent, which was getting busy with a long line. I started helping in food prep, assembling hotdogs in their buns and sleeves, but then I moved into expediting.

Orders came through a computer system. Patrons would pay and orders would get entered into the POS. On the service end we could see the differently numbered orders on a touch screen and people would give us their order number and we would get them the combination of pizza, drinks, hotdogs, hamburgers, and chips, al a carte or in combos. Then the order could get cancelled off the screen.

One main bottlenecks in the system was communicating the orders to the order fillers. The touchscreen was temperamental and the orders did not display in the sequence in which they were made. Then ensuring the people serving the food knew the items and to whom they went also broke down easily.

They other was on the production end. Food often ran out and needed to be cooked, or we needed the pizza delivered.

So I stepped in to help communicate the orders to servers. I would call out the orders to food and drinks and connect the patron with the person who would be delivering their order. It strained my voice and it was stressful, but we made it through I worked in there for about 7 hours and other were there longer.

My main disappointments about the food tent is how more and better planning could have improved the operation and how little support there was from other volunteers.

Slimy chair

At set down time, it is easy to see how much people are jerks, leaving trash and empty alcohol containers around. Someone even took a chair and threw it in the lake.

During clean up on Monday we got a radio call about the chair and drove over. It was about 8 metres out in the shallow and slimy water. Columbia lake is artificial, eutrophied, shallow, and gross. Someone said, “Ugh, can we just leave it there.” “Pffh,” I said and pulled off my shoes and socks and waded out into the water to retrieve the chair.

Moving barriers

Later Nopa and I started moving the heavy galvanized barriers in a pickup truck. We go good at it too packing more in faster and driving them up to the collection point. We switched jobs from being on the ground to being in the truck bed. But I got tired later and asked him to let me do the ground job, which was generally heavier work, but required less fine movement.

He counted them when we were done and we moved 73 of those barriers.

The end

So over the course of the weekend I ended up working about 50 hours. Monday afternoon Leanne was going to get coffee and she asked me if I wanted her to get me one. “Nah, i don’t … actually yes please.” I began replying, but changed my mind midstream.