Almost there!

I'm suffering from Post Olympics Depression at the moment. There was a time when I had four live feeds running simultaneously on my two screens at work, and now it's so.. bare. There's nothing on it anymore. Except for work. Of course.

So I've been reliving the last two weeks by reading several blogs which were brilliant in capturing the spirit and atmosphere of the Olympics. I like the Diamond Geezer's blog for its quintessentially British wit and surprisingly in depth information, while I also enjoy reading other people's experiences of attending the Opening Ceremony and their participation in the Closing Ceremony.

I personally thought the Closing Ceremony was OK, not particularly great, but I guess Danny Boyle just hit the ball out of the park with that one - I guess it was really difficult to top that, no matter how many boy and girl and man bands you throw at it.

At the moment, I'm just counting the days before I take temporary residence in London. I'm really excited about getting out there and continuing the good work that the Olympics Games Makers have done before me. Prior to the Olympics, you wouldn't have thought that there would be this much love for us volunteers. Most journalists were seeking scathing comments from volunteers about how us gullible people were getting exploited by greedy corporates*, and now it's amazing to see how the tables have turned. We're getting standing ovations in the Closing Ceremony, Adidas is giving (even more) free kit, Las Iguanas is giving us free glasses of cava tomorrow (inapplicable to me!), someone's given BBC a call to nominate Games Makers as the Sports Personality of the Year for its Team category, and there are rumours circulating that all Games Makers will be invited to line The Mall on 10th Sept when Team GB's parade hits London!

And all this is happening even before my first shift!

It's a really weird situation to be in. I feel really honoured to be a part of this acclaimed group of wonderful people, yet I also feel like I haven't earned my stripes yet, which makes me even more excited to prove to people that us Paralympics GMs can do just as well, if not better!

Me in uniform! Plus my knitted Games Maker :)

I'm just raring to go!

* Did you know that McDonald's is footing the bill for all our GM training sessions? During our Role Specific Training, we were shown videos starring the comedian Chris Addison showing us what to do and what *not* to do in various situations that we might come across. The training was funny, engaging, and not boring at all. So I find it ironic that when people praise GMs for doing such a sterling job, nobody really gives credit to McDonald's for providing us all with such good training in the first place!

Joy and Agony

As soon as I got to Wembley Arena last Sunday to watch Lee Chong Wei battle it out against Lin Dan, I couldn't believe the atmosphere, it was unbelievable. The people on TV keep bandying the word 'phenomenal' to describe the atmosphere, and they really are correct. There's no other word that can describe how it feels like to be a part of it.

She has lots of flags!

I was hoping that I might be able to borrow a Malaysian flag from someone there. Luckily when I got in, two rows down there were these two guys with a flag each, so I pounced on them :P I ended up with this massive flag that's meant to be held by 6 people!

Us with the massive flag, the top-down ones you drop down the side of a building.

Throughout the match, it wasn't just a duel of badminton prowess between the two athletes; it was also a battle of vocals between the two camps. The noise was deafening! At every point scored, and in between each rally, supporters from both sides would be shouting at the top of our lungs. Us Malaysians would alternate between "Malaysia BO-LEH!" and "Lee Chong Wei, Lee Chong Wei", whilst the Chinese would retaliate with "Lin Dan Chaiyok!" and if I'm completely honest, I think we were totally outdone by the Chinese - they're so loud!!

When Lee Chong Wei was up by 19-18 in the rubber game, the whole Malaysian camp went wild. I think it was only at that point when I actually considered that we *may* actually do this, we might just get GOLD! Alas, as the wise Bane from Dark Knight Rises says, "there can be no true despair without hope". When Lin Dan screamed with joy at winning his 2nd successive gold medal, it was such a painful moment for me, especially when Lee Chong Wei slumped and cried :'(

We're so proud of you :')

There's a lot of debate about our chances of getting an Olympic gold medal now, considering Malaysia's over-reliance on the same athletes. All of our other athletes have fizzled out at the moment, and Lee Chong Wei had claimed that this was his last Olympics. He has now done a U-turn and says that if his physical condition allows for it, then he might give it a shot. He's also committed to developing future world-class badminton players, which should bode well for our future Olympic quests. For now, we'll just have to be thankful that Lee Chong Wei's around so that our London 2012 entourage doesn't return completely empty handed!

Malaysia Boleh!

Tomorrow, I'll be on my way to see Malaysia's Lee Chong Wei battle it out with arch rival Lin Dan from China for the badminton men's singles gold medal!

The Malaysian press has exploded with stories of the nation's hopes resting on Chong Wei's shoulders. Apparently if Chong Wei wins gold, then Baskin Robbins will give away free ice cream at all 61 Malaysian outlets within a 2-hr window!

The BBC ran a story about the incentives that ahtletes would get from winning gold, and I chuckled seeing that British ones only get their faces on stamps! If Lee Chong Wei wins gold for Malaysia, he'll earn upwards of £800k (£200k cash and a £200k gold bar) plus a lifetime pension of £1000 a month (approximately 2 or 3 times the salary of a fresh grad).

Apparently our Prime Minister's wife has flown in from Malaysia just to attend tomorrow's final. Lee Chong Wei's brother and closest friends are also being flown in for the same reason. Let's not speculate how they were able to get tickets at this sold out event...

Seeing how proud the UK is with their golden stars like Jessica Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah, I really really hope that tomorrow afternoon, I'll be able to cry with joy whilst singing my national anthem out loud.

Fingers crossed :)

The Quest for Tickets

Ask anyone around me and they'll know that I'm probably the last person in the world to diss the Olympics. I can deal the with £9 billion budget (actually £11 billion if my sources are correct), coz it's a lot cheaper than what Beijing paid. I can deal with the overt corporate sponsorship, coz McDonald's is funding all the training we GMs get and Adidas is sponsoring my uniform and trainers which I'll get to keep. I can even deal with the gridlock of tourists swarming London transport, coz, well, I'm used to swearing underneath my breath everytime I hit a wall of slowpokes in London. At the height of the Olympics moaning by both friends and the media, I took solace by ignoring the negative press and by blocking my whiny friends.

However, if there's one thing that I must make an exception for, it's the Olympics ticket sales.

When the first ballot for Olympic tickets came up, I put in bids for the cheapest tickets for the Opening Ceremony, and the badminton finals. With the strange ballot process, I had to leave a few hundred pounds in my account just so that it may get withdrawn from at some point in the future by an unknown organization. If fraudsters were looking for a window of opportunity, they definitely had that for a good few months last year.

I had no hope in hell of getting the Opening Ceremony tickets, coz the whole world was gunning for those, so it was a pleasant surprise when I found out that I've been allocated two tickets for the badminton finals. Malaysia's best prospect for gold is in badminton, so I was quite chuffed about snagging tickets.

A year on, my smugness about getting tickets have been turned into desperation because I now want more tickets! MOAR! Especially since I've just realized that when I volunteer for the Paralympics, my accreditation doesn't give me access to the Olympic Park, so I'll have to buy tickets to get in!

So I've been scouting the wonderland that is the official tickets website, looking for more Olympic tickets. My friend's written a brilliant post about the joys of using it, and so has this blog post, and I concur wholeheartedly. Ever since LOCOG announced that they're reselling tickets throughout the duration of the Games, the ticket-buying process has just been even worse. You jump with joy when the website says you can indeed buy the cheap tickets online, then you select the ones you want, click 'Request the tickets', wait upwards of 20 mins before your hopes are cruelly dashed with the ominous 'No tickets left' :(

It hurts, LOCOG, it really does. How can you give me so much hope, just to keep me waiting for so long, only to be rejected in the end? And I keep getting rejected over and over again. Talk about pushing my psychological buttons!

But anyway, to alleviate the situation, I have now panic bought some Paralympic tickets that will get me into the Olympic Park and an ExCeL day pass, so all's well I suppose :)

Opening Ceremony Rehearsal

A few weeks back, us Games Makers were sent an email about a competition for tickets to attend the rehearsal of the Opening Ceremony. We needed to answer one easy multiple-answer question, email it to the organizers and then hope for the best. Well, in the end it turned out the best did happen to a lot of us, coz there were thousands of us Games Makers who turned up at the two rehearsals that were open to the public!

So I got one ticket for the rehearsal last Wed 25th July and I was well ecstatic about it. I realized that this might be the only time I would have the chance to enter the Olympic Park throughout the Olympics, so I really wanted to make the most of my time there.

A lot things didn't go to plan that day; my train from Southampton was 20 minutes delayed, then at Waterloo the tube station was closed due to a fire alert. And then when I did get into the Olympic Park, my two camera batteries died even before I got into the Olympic Stadium, so I had to rely on my old Nokia brick phone to take pictures during the rehearsal!

Nonetheless, I managed to get in, and it was an amazing experience, from arriving into Stratford tube station, all the way to the rehearsal itself. There must've been around 60,000 people in the park that day, and everyone seemed really excited that the Olympics is finally here. Unfortunately they closed off the North Park, so we only had half of the Olympic Park to wander round.

I've got loads of photos on my Facebook page, so if you've got the right privacy settings then you'll be able to see them ;)

During the rehearsals, they didn't disclose everything to us. They blanked out the Queen's heli-jump, and also Mr Bean's sketch, plus we definitely didn't see the cauldron at all. They got Games Makers to stand in as the Queen and Prince Phillip which was awesome! Plus, I was sitting at the front row (woohoo!) which would've been brilliant save from the fact that I'm short and I couldn't really see much past the shrubs that were dumped right in front of me during the Industrial Revolution scene! So I was really looking forward to seeing how it was all going to come together on TV, and it was just as spectacular as I had experienced it :)

I'm slightly peeved that I didn't realize that Tim Berners-Lee was gonna be in it!! I saw a man typing away underneath the raised house, but the screen didn't say who it was, and he just seemed like an ordinary bloke just typing away, as you do.. Now I'll never know if it really was him that I saw on Wednesday, or whether it was just some stand-in!

I left the stadium at 22:20, right at the beginning of the "athletes" march (they got troops and Games Makers to stand in!), and it took me an hour just to get to the tube platforms! Immense credit to the Games Makers in charge of traffic flow. It was a difficult job, yet they were all happy and smiling and their banter with the crowd was ace. Hope to carry on their good work when I start soon :)

P/S: I'm quite impressed that everybody did their bit to #savethesurprise. I guess the winning trick was to get Danny Boyle to come out and ask the audience not to spoil it!

Why I'm Volunteering: The Interview

When I first heard that applications for Games Makers would be open back in 2010, I felt like it was a no-brainer. Up till then, I've been doing all sorts of work for the University, from helping on buses, to directing people on Open Days, to giving tour guides for UCAS Days. Granted, I've been paid for all of these gigs, but I just felt that volunteering for the Olympics was a natural thing to do.

If people were to ask me why would I want to do all these things without payment, I guess that's where I struggle to make people understand. To me, I feel that taking part in the Olympics and being a small cog in the big LOCOG machine is well worth the effort, time and money. It's a sense of national pride, funnily enough. I remember when I went to the interviews for Games Makers, we all had a chance to write on these massive blank whiteboards whatever we wanted to say. It was sort of like being given the opportunity to leave our mark about what it means to be a Games Maker. These whiteboards were going to be preserved and hung somewhere in public where people could see it. You know what I wrote on it? A big sunny smiley face with the words "Malaysia Boleh!" (Malaysia Can) :D

I actually don't know what's happened to those whiteboards actually.. It's entirely plausible that they've just wiped out the boards when we weren't looking, and presented blank slates to the incoming recruits everyday :P

I only got the call up for my interview almost 2 years after I had submitted my application. By that point, I had absolutely no hope of getting in, so I was really psyched. I found out that I've been allocated to the Venue Entry Team. Great! The website didn't have much info on what the role involved, so I just assumed that it's the standard ticket checking, 'hello how are you please sit there' kind of thing. So off I went to ExCeL London for my interview and collected my documents, and that's when I was given a further leaflet on what the Venue Entry Team was supposed to be doing: welcoming people into venues and advising them to get their bags open and ready for inspection.


They wanted me to be an unpaid airport security guard :-O


Anyways, I went into my interview 'pod' - one of the partitioned sections in the big massive room - and met this really lovely lady who was a Games Maker herself. Apparently at that stage, all the interviews were being done by Games Makers themselves, which was quite interesting.


It was like a standard job interview, and then she asked about examples of where I've shown teamwork, leadership, cooperation, etc. All of which I answered with stints from my Unilink bus duties :D I said that I've been helping out with the buses for years and I've been told that I'm really good at it and I love doing it :) She wondered why I wasn't allocated into the Transport team, which has a Bus Team as well. I just shrugged. She continued scribbling away on her pieces of paper while I continued to ramble away about why I want to volunteer.

I left the interview feeling quite upbeat with my chances. 250,000 people applied to become a Games Maker, but after the good buzz I got from my interviewer, I felt like I had a good chance of getting in. So I started to psych myself up for being the friendliest security guard I could possibly be.

Then a month later, I received my Games Maker Offer:

Paralympic Games Transport Bus Team Member at the Athletes Village.

WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE :D :D :D (cartwheels!)

N.B.: Apparently the Venue Entry Team allocation I had was for the Olympics, and even up until now, my Games Maker dashboard online says it's 'under review'. I think it's safe to say that I won't be doing it after all :P

Hello World :P

Hi, I'm Dayah, and I'm a Games Maker :)

I'm a volunteer for the London Paralympics 2012, and I'm part of a 70000-strong team of Games Makers who will be spending our time and money to be part of the greatest show on Earth :)

I've been contemplating about starting this blog for a while now, seeing how other fellow GMs have made their own for quite some time. Yet I've always thought against it because I didn't feel like there were enough happenings to warrant a blog.

Now that the Olympics is TOMORROW (well, the Opening Ceremony anyway, I know football's already started!) I can't help but start writing away. There's so much that's happened in the last few weeks, now I'm regretting I didn't start earlier!

The other reason why I wanna write is because I'm so full of pumped up energy and excitement about the Olympics and being a GM that I've probably exhausted my resources of people willing to listen to me gush about it. Especially since the majority of people around me don't like having the Olympics in London :P

Since I've now left it a bit late, I'll have to narrate my journey with a mix of things happening in the present with things that have happened in the past. I hope that'll make sense!

First and foremost, an overview of what's happened so far:

Early 2010 - Signed up to a newsletter to express my interest to become a Games Maker.
Sept 2010 - Submitted my application to become a Games Maker.
Apr 2011 - Applied for Olympic tickets via the ballot system.
Jun 2011 - Got Badminton men's final tickets - woohoo!
Jan 2012 - Got interviewed at ExCeL for my Games Maker role.
Feb 2012 - Offered a role for Paralympics - woohoo!!
Mar 2012 - Attended Role Specific Training at Hackney
Apr 2012 - Received my shifts for duty
Jul 2012 - Attended the Opening Ceremony technical rehearsal as part of a Games Maker thank you - woohoo!!!

Sooooo.. lots *has* happened, and I'll most likely talk about one or two of those events, but for now, I CAN'T WAIT FOR THE OLYMPICS TO START!