An interruption in the day of a programming group member
By Kari Stewart, talks administrator.
(There's a group of people you'll rarely see at Greenbelt without a phone pressed to their ear. Here's a quick story illustrating the kind of thing they'll be working on.)
Running across centre course... my phone rang. Again. It was a lovely volunteer from Contributor's Reception who had a rather confused Alister McGrath with her. He was under the impression that he was going to be speaking at 10:00 am but the programme/daily diary she had said he was speaking at Jerusalem at 1:45 pm. Not sure where the mix-up happened, but regardless of that, we had a bit of a problem.
Alister was meant to be speaking at another event in the afternoon. He managed to switch things around with the other event so that he could be at Greenbelt for the afternoon slot, but he had a request: since he would be arriving back on site just half an hour before his talk started, he wanted to make sure that he would be able to pull into site, park, and get to his venue quickly – an entirely reasonable request.
I grabbed programme coordinator Matt Stone to find out who I could talk to about getting Alister a parking spot near the grandstand. Matt directed me to Operations Manager Stuart Radcliffe who said that Alister could park in Essential Users parking right next to the grandstand. He passed me over to another Operations worker who provided me with a parking pass for Alister.
I phoned Alister back and gave him instructions for how to enter the racecourse in order to get to the parking lot and asked him to phone me when he was five minutes away so that I could meet him at the entrance and give him the parking pass. Everything went according to plan. Alister phoned me just when he arrived on site. He wasn't sure exactly where he was in relation to where he needed to be, but we worked out that he was right outside Contributor's Reception. I directed him around to the entrance next to Centaur and handed him the parking pass. He pulled into the car park in plenty of time to get to his speaking venue.
I was really pleased walking by later to see a huge crowd at his talk and to know that it was very much worth him rearranging his schedule.
