Reading, the festival that never was...

Reading Festival,

Cancelled

Ok calm down, not really.

I'm just not going. I just can't afford it (the woes of a student) and although it was the one I was most looking forward to, it also had a flip side of scaring me a little.

The news reports of the Sunday riots, the general crowd dynamic (wow my lecturer would be impressed with me whipping out that term) just worry me especially as I would be expected to deal with these situations and if my 2 festivals with Oxfam have taught me anything it would be this: Don't expect to learn anything until you have to deal with it.

This can be fine, you can't brief about every eventuality in a 20 minute chat before you go on shift and for Download and Glastonbury this was more often than not perfectly adequate. But I can just imagine being faced with a crowd issue, like surging, or the large amount of unsafe fires that Reading is infamous for without any backup, support or prior training other than a video of a man tackling a bucket fire with a fire extinguisher and how this is not appropriate because the force just knocks it over and only last about 2 seconds.

So yes, no Reading for me. My stint with Oxfam is done.

BUT bring on End of the Road!

Glastonbury, home to angry people.

Glastonbury Festival,

21st June ~ 28th June

I know it's a while after Glastonbury but here is the summary.

It was hot.

Very hot. Which made trying to sleep when not on shift almostimpossible, which made for a lot of grumpy workers and some very high ones.

I was working on checking the photos on tickets, the security features and taking the stubs off. I also did a very uncomfortable stint working on the outer gate making sure everyone had their passouts ready before they got to the inner gates to ease congestion. This was where I faced most of my abuse, because people were taking a bit of a run up from the car park with all their gear after taking the tent in on the first run.

Glastonbury has a weird system of wristband, ticket and passout needed to get back into the festival. I have never heard of anywhere else that has this passout system, nor had most of the people who I had to ask to see their passouts, it was either, WHATS THE POINT OF THESE BLOODY THINGS???? Which I hadn't actually been briefed to answer (note Oxfam: Maybe teach your stewards the answer to some of these questions?) and also....

'What's a passout?'

This last was the dreaded reply, because that means they are either trying to pull a fast one and have someone else's ticket and a fake wristband or a borrowed wristband or well any means of getting into the festivals without paying. Or the more likely, they stormed out of the festival because they are hot, thirsty, been sitting in traffic since 6am, missing the England match, have a few screaming kids dragging behind them or just had no idea they had to stop, and were missed by the stewards handing out the passouts and letting you know you had to keep hold of them.

Well my first one was a guy who hadn't been given one, I had no idea what to do, so as usual its a run around to find a supervisor because as the security told us on our gate they 'don't give a fuck, he ain't getting in without a passout'. At that rather damning reply, the 20-something guy in front of me looked a little close to tears for my comfort zone so yes, some speedy running to get someone who could sort it out. It actually turned out that it was easily sorted out, a little visit to the ticket office, some questioning, checking the photo matches the ID etc. and you can get in. So a little more on the job learning to add to my festival knowledge.

Back to my main job of the festival, working on the ticket checking stations, to begin with it was just that, check the photo, check the security features, rip it, tell them to keep the ticket out for the wristbanding guys.

By the second hour it was check the photo, ask them to take their sunglasses and hat off, check the security features, construct make-shift shade around the light boxes so you can actually see the security features, rip it, stuff the ends into an over full bag which keeps falling over, tell them to keep the ticket out for the wristbanders, answer questions about where there is camping space left (classic answer: I've been on shift for 4 hours, I have no idea), where do they get the programme and laminate lanyard thing from (I didn't even get one of these!) and why am I not doing their wristband.

Then we became the vehicles for important festival information (why can't this be sent out with the tickets?) such as: you must have your ticket on you at all times (met to gasps and moans) and you must have your ticket if you want to leave the site and please remember to collect a passout. This all had to be said as eager customers were heading to the wristbanding area, ignoring me and generally cursing the heat, the sun, standing up and in several cases me as well.

Glastonbury vs. Download

This really didn't end up as I thought, I actually don't know how this is possible but I enjoyed Download more, the work aspect I mean.

We had a job, we had a chat, the customers seemed happier, they joked (better jokes than I AM READY TO PASSOUT... geddit?) and seemed to be interested in our jobs rather than at Glastonbury, as we have been referred to on a popular festival forum, seen as 'jobsworths' out to ruin the fun of the masses.

Glastonbury appeared to have a lot of angry people, angry at the queues (this is compared to the 20 people I met at 8am who had been there since about 3am at Download who were actually, other than knackered, generally happy people), people were angry about the passout system, the 3 part security checks (ticket, wristband, passout) and all the other 'admin' that went on before you even set foot on Worthy Farm.

At Download, Oxfam seemed a lot more interested in if you were ok, I was left out in the heat wave of that week repeatedly promised I would rotate with the shadierpositions for about 5 hours at Glastonbury.

I put this down to the sheer numbers at Glastonbury (volunteers topped about 2,000 in the Oxfield) compared to Download (this is a guesstimate but I think around 300).

Once again I didn't want a good camera to end up broken in a field, so this little gem from my phone camera, the view over a very empty (of people, not buildings, almost everything was set up by Monday) Worthy Farm on the Monday before Glastonbury.

Download, the ups and the... downs.

Download Festival,

8th June ~ 13th June

So I have just completed my first volunteering festival.

I learnt more about crowd control, searching bags, dutchband and standing up for 8 hours in the cold and the rain than my first year of uni has taught me and as for the standing, the sore legs after a standing gig don't even come close to the pain I felt when I signed off my last shift of the festival!

Crowd Control: the only time I got a bad vibe from the usually happy Download crowd was on my last shift. Me and my other half turned up about half hour early to a very tired night shift of 2 stewards who had run out of wristbands at about 4, it was now half 7 and the queue of people was HUGE. So the new bands arrived with our trusty dutchband supervisor and I got to work. The customers weren't chatty, they were cold, been standing around due to an error on management's part and not in the mood for this new way of wristbanding so it was head down, get people through quickly and this was my moment to shine!

450 wristbands done in under an hour! With none that were rejected for falling off or being uneven.

Searching Bags: I got to watch the security guys searching all the people I had just wristbanded and the variation in the intensity was immense but it all went back to crowd control and the (poor) layout of our tent. If they searched every bag we got people moaning about how slow it was, we got lines back past our machines so we couldn't wristband everyone and people kept missing the machines and ending up without a band.

Dutchband: yep this was the company with the new bands, no shiny metal ties or plastic bits just melted together. But seriously these machines needed to come with a health warning, I lost a fair few bits of skin to the razor sharp edges as did our Dutchband supervisor who works with them all the time! So sorry to any of my customers who got some of my blood as well as a wristband :s

Standing Up: yep it hurt, I have some knee issues that caused me a bit of pain (locking, inverting etc.) but my Rocketdog short wellies were surprisingly comfy and warm. My panda hat got an outing on my night shifts and the very start of my morning one (more shit hair than cold for the morning) earned me the nickname of BAD PANDA or EVIL PANDA from the security guards who were out in the car park with me because I seemed to have more info for lost punters than they did and was apparently 'making them look stupid'.

And why most people work at festivals..... THE BANDS

Luckiest shift selection ever... Wednesday 5-1, Thursday 4-12 and Friday 8-4. So all done an hour after the first band hit the stage, all with a free ticket and two very snazzy security and front of house wristbands which meant we didn't have to queue to get in and out of the arena or walk the long way round to get back to our tent.

I didn't take a camera as I only own a very expensive DSLR, and Download was not the place for it. So I only have this to show you the results of raising £15K for a charity whilst still having an amazing time.

The Set-Up

The Beginning: The Best Place to Start

I am an undergraduate studying Events Management, so for my summer (all 4 months of it) I decided to give up my time by working at some festivals.

The Pros:

Free entry to festivals

Free food to keep you working hard

A lot of training, both on the job and pre-festival

It might just be me but I feel a little bit special to know that I got one of the sort after places at some of the most popular festivals

I'm working with my other half, so lots of time to make some memories

The deposit, you get it back, after your last festival, so for me, about September, just in time to help me endure my second year at uni

The Cons:

Work, 24 hours of it to be precise

No pay (all the money goes to the charity I am working for)

A night shift, 8 hours of working OVERNIGHT, I am a little afraid of this one, because if I fall asleep and am caught I could be thrown out of the festival and black listed

The stuff you have to buy, the tent, the rucksack, the sleeping bags

The deposit, yes it comes under both a pro and a con, you don't get any interest on the money that was asked for back in March, you just get it back, but all interest does go to the charity so it's not a bad old world after all

The Details:

Download Festival: June 8th-14th, not that we knew we had to be there Tuesday until the beginning of this week, yes just a week before the festival, there had been rumours, rumblings if you will of this change because everyone arrives on the wednesday and seeing as we are working as the wristbanders we bloody well needed to be there before everyone needed to have a nice wristband strapped onto them.

Glastonbury: June 21st-28th, yes this one is a week, because for the first year Glastonbury is allowing people to park up on the Tuesday night after 9pm to get them off the roads. So to avoid this we are all being asked to be down and registered on the Monday. Working on tickets for this, checking them under the UV light and checking faces to pictures. This is the one I feel most privileged to have gotten a place for, so many people want to go, its sold out and people turn to the working route just to be there even if they miss 24 hours spread over 3 days at least they can say: Glasto '10, yeah I was there.

Reading: August 25th-30th. A shorter spell but one I know very little about at the moment other than a small gem from the trainer at my training session... 'If you are working Reading, learn the signal for violence, you'll need it.' Which as a young girl just fills me with excitement.... yeah right.

And my corporate venture.....

End of the Road: September 8th-13th, I have no clue about what I am doing, where I am sleeping, how long I am working or even if I get fed... that's because I am working for the festival organisers, purely as a favour to a friend who is going but didn't want to go alone, but there was no way I was going to pay for a festival I knew none of the bands playing there. If I'm not paying for Glastonbury I'm not paying for this.

And so it really begins...