Can I Keep this Temp Job, Too?

Since athletics doesn't start at my assigned venue in the Bird's Nest until August 15, some of us flash quote reporters were farmed out to help out at other venues. My name got drawn out of a hat pretty quickly so I could choose between boxing, volleyball, and basketball. I knew that a couple of die hard basketball fans would probably spend the rest of the trip giving me the evil eye if I chose the basketball venue as a non-expert who's only occasionally interested in the sport.

I chose volleyball, and then got assigned to the smaller of the two venues hosting men's and women's volleyball, the Beijing Institute of Technology Gymnasium. This has turned out to be absolutely perfect and what I had dreamed of for the Olympics--and in many ways different from what I will be doing at the Bird's Nest for Track & Field. Everything is on the smaller scale I had hoped to see at the Games--not the hugeness and media spotlight of the iconic National Stadium and the stardom of athletics events.

At TIG (some of the Olympic venue acronyms make little sense--I guess this one stands for Technology Institute Gymnasium, but no one is sure), we host two volleyball matches a day (which I get to sit and watch), we can only seat 5,000 fans, the Olympic News Service office only has four staff members and six volunteers (plus two temp volunteers), and I recognize other staff members, volunteers, and members of the media after being there only 3 days. At the Bird's Nest, events will be finishing at minimum every seven minutes, the stadium seats 91,000 people, the ONS staff is about 16 people and there are 25 ONS volunteers in ONS, and during training I never saw the same person twice in the gigantic oval hallway surrounding the lower level of the Bird's Nest.

And the staff and volunteers at TIG are like a family. Since we arrive at 6:20 to 6:40 in the morning and don't start work until about 8:30 (don't ask, this seems to be an odd Chinese tradition) we have time to have breakfast and coffee together. (These Chinese girls drink coffee and not tea strangely enough...I don't know if it's because they got into it when their two volunteers from Australia arrived 3 or 4 weeks ago.) We also get to chat a lot during our extended lunch which we eat around 3 p.m. (extremely late here where average lunch time is 11:30) after the matches are done for the day. I feel more connected with this group after 3 days of work than after training on and off for several weeks with the other crew.