There were three of these gates, as entrances to the festival. (The red tulips in the photo, are the same tulips that were at the Glade festival!) Arena Entrance 2: (stewarding guidelines given) You will be checking wristbands, and managing the cross over between cars on the arena road and pedestrians crossing to enter the gate. This needs to managed carefully, and you should be provided with a movable gate to swing between stopping cars and stopping people.
(In my own words. . !) The jobs that the stewards had to do on these gates were to primarily check wristbands. At Glade, for example, there were three wristbands: festival goer's, traders and backstage (which was security, organisations, press, artists etc.) At WOMAD, I never worked out how many different wristbands there were, as there were so many! You had a blue one for the festival, an orange one for Oxfam, and light blue for children, a pink one for traders, a white one for trader's children, a multi-coloured one for backstage, so on and so on. And they differed everyday, as there were also day passes on Saturday and Sunday only. This caused no end of problems.
The stewards working on these gates also had to tell the festival goer's about the 'No glass, no cans' on site. If a festival goer turned up at the gate with a glass bottle of something, he could either drink it there and then, or transfer into a plastic bottle. The same with cans. You could buy alcohol on site, there was just a no glass or can policy. Some people got very irate when I told them. What I couldn't figure out, was that, on the festival site, inside the arena, there was recycling points for everything, including glass. .. ??
The arena gates were also used as roads. When there were no pedestrians coming from the campsite over into the festival, the Harrison fences had be closed to allow traffic along the road. There were many instances where the festival goer's could see, and had been told there was a vehicle coming, yet they still couldn't wait the 15 seconds on one side of the track, and had to run across to the other side. I saw alot of near misses that weekend.
Then there was all the little questions and queries the festival goer's would ask you: where are the nearest toilets/ water point/ cash machine. Occasionally we did get a found or lost child, and called the appropriate people. This festival was definitely more challenging then the last!
1st Shift: 9:45- 18:0o(24/7/09)
My first shift was good and we didn't have any slip-ups. There were five people working on the gate (including me), plus a supervisor, and once in a while we would change the position we were in. There would be two stewards up one end of the entrance, checking wristbands on either side, and the other two working the gate at the other end. The supervisor would be on hand to deal with any questions the stewards couldn't ask, or to tell the gate stewards it was time to close them ,as there was a vehicle coming. This shift went by fairly quickly, the only problem that we did have was the wristbands. They were made of 'tough paper', and were clipped at the side. They were very easy to break off. The amount of people who came through the gates who did not have a wristband on them (it had fallen off), or the children had taken them off, or they had simply broken, were not best pleased when we told them they had to go down to Red Camping and get new ones. (Red camping was a long way away!) We also had some difficulty when people came by whose wristband had fallen off, and they didn't have it at all, they had lost it. With this, we again told them to go to Red camping, but to take their tickets with them to prove they had paid to get into the festival. Sometimes you could tell the festival goer's who had just turned up, not paid for a ticket and wanted to get in for free. The amount of vehicles going round the site was sometimes hazardous as well. One example would be, that I told some festival goer's on one side of the road to 'please stay where they were, as there was a car coming', but sometimes they didn't listen to me, and ran out into the road. This caused alot of the vehicles half the time to slam on their brakes and shout some obscenity to the passer's by. We did have one child that was lost, but the parents had already, very cleverly, written their mobile number down the child's leg in permanent ink. We ran the parents and they picked up the child. Over the course of the weekend, and frequently saw that child but again without his parent's. I was amazed how many parents thought it was OK to let their children run free around the site. (NB: Maybe when the child is 9 and upwards, but this child was about 4/5 years old!) This shift went by without anything major happen. This was a good shift. (Apart from the wristbands!)
2nd Shift 17:45pm- 2am
Night time shifts are always hard, whatever festival your at. The weather can chance constantly and the temperature also drops after 11pm, which can leave you feeling very cold if you have to stand around till 2am. Jumpers are a must! As it so happened, I looked a bit like the Michelin man this shift, as I had so many layers on me! Seemingly it also rained. On this shift, we again had problems with the wristbands, as we also had day trippers come to the festival just for Saturday. The colour for these wristbands happen to be a colour they had had a couple of years earlier. Some festival goer's were trying to get in using old bands. We also had to tell many people not to bring glass or cans onto the site. It was now the evening and lots of people wanted to come for the live acts, bringing alcohol in with them. Most of the festival goers understood the policy and were quite happy to go away, transfer what-ever they had into a plastic bottle and come back, some on the other hand, did not. I did have quite a few people shout at me in the face because they did not want to 'hand over' their alcohol. Like I said in the Glade blog, there are some people who come to festival to have a good time, others just see us as an annoying hindrance. Unfortunately, I found more of these people at this festival, than at Glade. (I think it was because of the lack of drugs!) I also had one man who pushed me into the road and swore in my face because he had to get across the road and to s*d the traffic because he was in a hurry. I was shocked at this behaviour, and did cry. I was tired and disbelieving of some of the behaviour and the rude attitudes I had to deal with.
3rd Shift 1:45am-10am
This was one of the hardest shifts I had to do at this festival. Maybe because it was at 2 in the morning till 10, and my body clock was not used to staying up over night, maybe it was that it was so cold, or maybe because I was moved around the site so often, I didn't know whether I was coming or going?! I started out at Arena gate 2, but at 3am I was moved to an exit gate over the other side of the site as there were no more festival goer's on site. (It was the last night, and all the bands had finished at midnight.) At this exit gate I had to check the people coming through, as no-one was supposed to be going onto site apart from traders who were sleeping in their shop tents. But there was no-one about. Then I was moved to another exit gate further up the site as I was on the other gate on my own, and my supervisor didn't think it was very wise to have a female manning a gate on her own at 4am. This second exit gate I shared with a security guard. Still there was no-one around and nothing to do except to sit and chat. (Which does sound like a pretty easy job, but it was freezing and the rain hadn't stopped since 5pm the evening before.) I was then moved to Arena gate 1, exactly the same as Arena gate 2, just again, further down the site. The coffee buggy was here, so I warm up a little! I was then finally moved back to the Oxfam campsite and then had to check wristbands from the people coming through. Only Oxfamers (orange and blue wristband) and Recycling crew (another colour, I cant remember!) were allowed through to the field. Unfortunately, no-one had told me than after a certain time, normal festival goer's were allowed through our field to get to their cars (on the other side of our field) so i was sending many people back the way they came. After an hour of doing this, I went and asked in the Oxfam box about the amount of people coming through, and they replied they were allowed now.
By 10am I was exhausted and ready to drop. Only then did the sun come out and it was impossible to sleep in my tent in the heat. I will remember that shift for a long time!
Conclusion: This festival, as I have said, was far more demanding the Glade. Sometimes this is a good thing, as it is a challenge, rather than something you have done before. Although I enjoyed the festival, met some really lovely people, I will not be stewarding for WOMAD again next year. I just could not adjust to the rudeness of some of the festival goer's. Most of the festival goer's were lovely and understood we were here to do a job and keep them safe, but I found many just wanted to wind us up as much as possible. At least at the Glade, everyone was so high as a kite they didn't really care, and their attitudes were laid back. But I felt at WOMAD, some of the festival goer's were not a such. Maybe I just had a bad experience and came across the wrong types of people? Either way, I can say I enjoyed the Glade far more.
Unfortunately, I do not have any photos for this festival, camera run out of battery!!
Keep checking on my blog for the next post.
Keep smiling Ruby Foxglove x x x
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.