One Games, Two Experiences

As you can see from the post by BG, he is getting it done internationally. In fact, we call him an international player - the greatest proof of how connected he is internationally was written by him in the blog. He will be setting, and attending, high level meetings between the USOC and IOC members, as well as key international figures. Awesome.

What this blog will show you is how two people, who work for the same organization, on the same floor (in fact, just three doors apart) will have COMPLETELY different experiences at the same event. While Bob is out interacting with the heavy hitters, those of us in the village will be doing this type of stuff....

Today in the village we had a leak. The roof access point in one of our buildings was not sealed well. This would not be a problem except we had two consecutive days of snow, followed by today, which was snow and now a steady, nasty and cold rain. So we had water on the floor where our offices are located. After several attempts (3) to get the situation fixed - we finally had a crew of three guys show up to "fix" it. Their fix was to put some plastic inside the window and stop the water. This made it worse. Instead of a drip, we had a full on run of water.

About two hours later (maybe longer), they came back, with more plastic, and this time climbed up on the roof and completely covered the leak. They then ran some more plastic inside and finished the job by using some string to lock the window down. I am not sure two of these three things would have happend had Eric (he refuses to let me use his last name) not told these three Italians (by using simple words and hand gestures (I think he told the guy to steal third, or possibly something bad, who knows)) what to do. Thankfully they finished about 12:15am and hopefully all is dry tomorrow.

The other "problem" that has popped up is that the elevator in another building of ours is stuck on the fourth floor. It has also taken on water. It will be interesting to see how they fix this one.

This situation can only be topped by the fact that while we were eating lunch today we watched a snow plow driver -with the plow on the back of his tractor - and facing towards the tractor - plow a 25 foot wide area, that was probably 200 feet long - for 30 minutes. It was like he had no idea what to do. The guy would last 10 minutes in Michigan.

Okay, I am going to cut this off for today. I want to say this, I took some heat from the band of law breakers I told you about the other day. Apparently they think that the Italian authorities read this site. Anyway, to them I offer my apologies and these words, if you choose to break the rules, it just may end up in print.

Only a few more days of setup and athletes start to arrive. We will keep you posted. I hope everyone is doing great.

Postscript: We got word that the reason for the strike at the airport was because they wanted a day off. Apparently this is common in Italy - museum workers strike - school kids strike, bus drivers strike. In fact, we were told that there was a bus driver strike one time, but the drivers were ordered to drive during morning and evening rush hour, so they did. They were on strike from 10 - 4. Beauty.