In the Home Stretch

This weekend has been the busiest one of our fall fundraiser. The traffic is horrendous, the crowds are huge, a good portion of visitors are drunk. It's all behind us- tomorrow is my final day of dealing with big crowds at work.

Most of the people who attend our events are lovely. They are nice people, and they help us keep our doors open. We actually had to cancel one major event tonight because we had a pop-up torrential downpour which inundated the parking lot. The event manager took a photograph of the site and forwarded it to the event manager at the site I typically work. A lot of attendees go to a couple of our events in a night, so I was able to tell people who told me of their plans to attend the other event that the event was cancelled, and show them the picture of the swamp which they would have been unable to extricate their cars from. I don't tend to have people 'jump bad' on me because I look like the guy in the profile picture, and having a picture to show them of the bad situation makes people even less likely to grouse and fuss.

I had another attendee politely complain to me that her group was split up because of a ticketing mixup and one thirteen year old girl was separated from everybody for about fifteen minutes. I heard subsequently from a co-worker that the woman had yelled 'fuck you' at her, and I wish I had known that at the time... this particular co-worker is a very sweet, shy college-aged girl who looks younger than her nineteen years, and she shouldn't be the one chewed out by a disgruntled visitor. Oh, well, she was joking about the woman's rudeness after we closed, and I immediately figured out who she was talking about. Oh, well, we can't all look like the guy in our profile picture, and some people like to 'jump bad' on people who are sweet.

Speaking of sweet people who don't have anybody 'jump bad' on them, my friend Kickass Sue came to the event with another judo player, a petite, pretty young woman who just happens to have been a nationally ranked judoka in Ecuador. They had a good time, and afterwards, they came to the gift shop, where Sue was able to speak Schweizerdeutsch with one of the shop assistants, whose family is from Graubünden. Sue was supposed to come back tonight with some other friends, but they wimped out because of the downpour... if she had been here, she could have given the rude attendee the old heave-ho.

Most people, though, were very sweet, very polite. The thing about politeness is that it is self-propagating. I had one very nice woman approach me with a plastic bag full of clothes- she had been caught in the downpour and the clothes she had been wearing were drenched. She asked me if we had a locker in which she could put her wet clothes, and I actually did something I don't normally do- I let her hang her wet clothes on a coathanger in my office so that they would dry out to a greater extent than they would in a plastic bag. After the event, she returned and the clothes were damp, but not saturated. It goes to show you, always have a handy change of clothes, and always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS be polite.

Tomorrow is the final day of our fundraiser, but it's not sold out by a longshot- a lot of people in the NY metro area go to the huge Halloween parade in lower Manhattan, other people go trick-or-treating or have parties. I only have to work half-a-day, and hopefully we'll be able to close up early. On Tuesday, things get nice and quiet... I can't complain about the month of chaos, though... it's 'paying my dues' for the tranquility of winter, and more importantly, it ensures that my paychecks don't bounce.