More of the same, Love Letter, The day I failed

My Monday had a lot of similarities to my Saturday and Sunday where the tedious process of deciding what does/doesn’t matter and then acting accordingly is repeated hundreds of time.  This process resulted in a huge pile of things by the street to be freely taken by whomever wanted them, a bunch of things that were not thrown being relocated to the small shed, and the garage and utility room having most of the stuff removed from them.  I also temporarily relocated all of my PEVs to the chicken coop until the painting is done.

The biggest hurdle I am going to have is trying to move furniture to enable them to paint certain rooms. I may try to temporarily stick some furniture on the covered part of the lanai to make it more workable. There will also be a last minute rush to empty the closet and pantry so those areas can be painted.  It’s weird but in some ways it feels like this part of the journey might be more bumpy than the move itself since I have already done a substantial amount of heavy lifting when it comes to simply getting rid of stuff, the hardest part of any move.

Late in the afternoon I went on another stress relieving ride, this time on my Begode T4.  It’s 16 inch form factor is a lot of fun to zip around on.  During the ride I talked about my incoming Sherman S and the state of the house prep work.  It felt good to get out of the house and just do something I enjoy.

I saw in my USPS informed delivery email that I have a citation coming from the city of Downey, one last annoying reminder of the shit show which was the AirBnB that we stayed at.  The citation is because the rental car was left on the street during the street cleaning day, something I was not made aware of by the AirBnB host until the day of the cleaning, after I was already out of the area.  I can hardly wait to pay my citation.

This past weekend was the Naples Half Marathon, for many years this was one of the most stressful times of the year when I was the race timer for the running club.  This was the most prestigious event we held with people coming from all over the country and world to participate.  It was a tremendous responsibility that I took very seriously.  Well one year I had an unmitigated disaster where I failed in upholding that responsibility.

Without getting too technical, the timing devices that were used have a unique code associated with them.  Each one of these devices is assigned to a runner bib number which is associated to a runner.  When setting up the timing system for a race there is a file that gets loaded that has all of these codes in them.  You get this file from the chip vendor when you buy chips.  It’s not a complicated process and I did it for every race before without issue which perhaps made me too complacent.

So as the first elite runner crossed the finish line I noticed a chip code for the runner popped up instead of the runners name, odd.  I also was running a manual timer as a back up where you hit a button as a runner crosses.  However once large amounts of runners start coming across simultaneously it becomes unreliable.  As more elite runners started crossing and all I saw was codes I felt sick to my stomach, something was screwed up.  This was my worst case scenario.

Distance runners care about how they did against their competition and the way they do that is via the official race timing, which I could not provide.  I had other club members shielding me from questions as I feverishly tried to figure out what happened, which I finally did.  The code file I got from the vendor was incorrect causing the mismatch.  I desperately tried getting someone from their support to see if they had the ability to send me the correct chip file which would have allowed me to correct the issue, they could not provide it to me.  I was dead in the water, I had failed.  So although the error was from the vendor, the cold truth was I could have scanned a few chips before the race just to verify everything looked ok.  I could have caught it.

So we did a half ass awards ceremony where we were only able to hand out a few awards based on the manual timing we captured at the finish.  I am the type of person that takes any responsibility I agree to take on seriously, failing that responsibility to thousands of runners hit me hard. The club got a letter from the mayor at the time, who was also a runner, complaining about how disappointed he was that the race results were not available.  Similar complaints rained in over the next several days and I deserved every one of them.  That feeling of failure ate at me and even though the race was over and the damage was done I was still trying to figure out a way to make things right.  I then came up with an idea.

There was a race photographer at the event that took a picture of every finisher.  I asked him if he would be willing to let me have those finish line shots.  He said I could but was curious what I wanted them for.  I told him I was going to use them to provide race results, manually. He was a bit shocked but sent me the thousands of pictures.  What followed was hours upon hours of work where I was cross referencing the timing data that I captured with the finish line photos which allowed me to associate a runner bib number with the chip code.  In the end I was able to formulate nearly complete results for every participant, albeit a week late.  It was one of my biggest failures but also turned out to be a one of my biggest triumphs as a race timer in the end.  I don’t give up.