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Re: Advice from a Boondoggle Survivor

To: <ba-autox@autox.team.net>
Subject: Re: Advice from a Boondoggle Survivor
From: Jim Ochi <jim_ochi@yahoo.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Mar 2002 15:21:13 -0800
At 11:41 AM 3/4/2002 -0800, Kelly, Katie wrote:

>1. Card pick-up and sorting. Do this about the time the current group starts
>their third runs. How do you do this? I don't know.

Actually, this is easy.  Workers should be called while the current group 
is starting their third runs.  The card sorter for the next group should be 
one of the people who respond - the card sorter should check in, then go to 
the second grid and pick up the cards.  Once they have the cards, they 
should sort them numerically, weed out and fix any duplicate numbers, and 
get them ready to put in the sorting box.  When it's time to do the 
on-the-fly trailer crew changeover, all the sorter has to do is sit down, 
insert the cards in the slots in the sorting box, and they're all ready to 
go.

The big point here is that when the call for workers goes out, EVERYONE for 
that work group needs to report.  Not just the course workers - the trailer 
crew, the tech people, the gate keepers, everyone working that group.

Now, something for everyone to think about.  Through the hard work of Barry 
and Ed, and a number of others, we managed to get a record number of cars 
through Sunday's event.  In my opinion, everything went perfectly - there 
were no major event stoppages, timer problems, etc.

If we wish to continue to support such a turnout, all of us need to chip in 
and do our part.  Things like reporting in to work early, helping newbies, 
working more than one job, stepping up to help out without being asked, 
having good easy-to-read numbers and class designation, having your car 
ready to go through tech without hassle, buying a helmet instead of 
depending on loaners, quick driver changeovers for multi-driver cars, etc. 
all contribute to making an event go smoothly.  Even the little things, 
like making sure that your reg card is filled out completely, or having 
your driver's license and SCCA card ready at registration will help.

If we can keep events going as smoothly as possible, we can manage to 
support this type of turnout.  If things stop going this smoothly, we'll 
probably have to take steps to limit the number of participants.  Whether 
this is a hard cap on the number of reg cards that are sold, or an increase 
in the entry fee, or changing to two runs, or ??? I don't know.  All I know 
is that the last time we started running into the problem of having too 
many entrants, we saw the "Members Only" policy as the least of all 
evils.  The other thing that I know is that showing up at Duel at DeAnza 
(hard cap of 275 entrants) at 6:30 am and finding out that you're number 
277 after standing in line for 3 hours really, really sucks.

Jim

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