Day 1 of Volunteering at Supanova
Sorry for the bad photography. I only had my iPhone on me at the time. Can’t wait for iPhone 4. XD
NB: WTF! WordPress flipped my pics! I’ll have to fix that later tho, sorry!
Whew! Well, day 1 of volunteering at Supanova is over! Boy am I knackered! ^_^;
It’s been a pretty interesting day, and although there were a few hiccups here and there, generally it was all good. 🙂
Like I mentioned in my previous blog post, I’ve decided to document how the whole experience goes so there’s more information about it available online to other potential volunteers. 🙂
So I thought I’d go about this in 2 phases. I’d document down everything that happened, and then write my overall feelings on the matter.
So, I rocked up to the Claremont Showgrounds today at 11:00. I got a bit lost along the way, but ended up finding the volunteer meeting by about 11:20. ^^; We covered the ground rules and were introduced to each other along the way, and told how the event will pan out. The founding father of Supanova also came along and told us how much he appreciated us coming to donate our time to running this event and how awesome it would be. 🙂
After that, after a bit of helping some suppliers with moving their stock, all of the volunteers set out to set up the show bags, collecting schedules, fliers and pamphlets, and placing them into plastic Supanova bags. I was pretty lucky to be on a table of volunteer veterans who knew their mettle and we were able to crank out the bags faster than any of the other tables. XD
Unfortunately, this led to some of the organisers bringing more of the bags from the other tables, picking up their slack, so to speak. ^^;
Sorting the bags took about 2 hours. And after that was lunch. The organisers brought in a pile of Domino’s Pizza, and then ‘allocated’ 2 slices to each volunteer, checking their names off as they received them. O_o
Following lunch, the volunteers all then went out to help unstack chairs in the theatres. This was a pretty slick job and took all of 20 minutes. After that, we spent another hour or so helping out with odd tasks, before we all went to watch the opening ceremony. 🙂
Based on my past experiences of volunteering for these kinds of things, I thought I’d make a few observations.
- There was a very slight air of disorganization to it. I was a bit unfortunate to slip through the cracks in that I didn’t receive a confirmation email telling me where to meet up, nor did I have a lanyard badge prepared (I’ve since constructed my own there). Given the sheer size and complexity of this event, I didn’t think too much of it though. But I’d definitely say you’ll have to use your initiative a little bit to stay on top of the ball here. 😉
- Doing lots of work quickly results in more work. ^_^; When my table finished our allocated show bags, we were then given bags from the other slower tables to finish off. While I realize we needed to get all of the bags finished, everyone at the table was saying they felt a bit burned by this… we effectively got rewarded from our good work with more work, with very little praise. ^_^;
- Lunchtime was borderline draconian. I was later informed that the budget for lunch was pretty tight.. which makes the system understandable, but it still felt a bit like food rationing when we were ‘allocated’ 2 slices of pizza, which was then logged under our name. -_- I’ve been told there’s a Subway up the street though, so thankfully, next time, I’ll just pop over there. 🙂
What I said up there were pretty much the only negative aspects I had for it, and that being said, all of them are pretty minor and easily able to handle with a bit of experience hehe. 🙂
That being said, I really don’t want to sound like I’m dissing anyone or being harsh. If you feel I’ve said something wrong, please let me know!
But aside from that, I had a great time. I got to make some new friends and have a good time discussing all manners of awesome geeky things. ^_^
Gotta get up pretty early tomorrow to get in for the actual show though! I have no clue what I’ll actually be assigned to do yet, so it’s going to be pretty exciting!
See you tomorrow!