communication let me down
Today has had it’s ups and downs. You know it’s going to be one of those days when by 9am you are already mentally blogging a tirade that would make a hooker blush.
it was a huge RC duty that is supposed to be run by a centre 45 mins away from us (but in effect we run it for them….) The roads were being closed off at 10AM ready for the event to start half an hour after that so we needed to leave from here at a bit past 9 yeah? Give us time to get there, scatter the ambis round the course and plug in my radio. nah, we had to leave in convoy at quarter past 8. Teh clocks changed today didn’t they? So that made it in effect quarter past 7, meaning me and Aprilia needed to crawl out of our pits nearly 2 hours before we normally grace the world with our precence. This in itself does not make for a good start.
Teh convoy was leaving from "the parking layby by Morrison’s roundabout, the one with the picnic sort of area near it" acording to Duke (who then legged it off to pick up an ambi and meet us at the convoy point. So off I toddled to the supermarket where there is a little parking area and, over a stile, a picnic area. There is no one there. I grabbed my phone only for the battery to die just as I started dialing. So I hare off home to phone Duke from there (no change for payphones even if I could find a working one) to find taht what he actually meant was "the parking layby on the A…. about a mile further on from the roundabout at Morrison’s warehouse" That’s the other side of the next town over from us. That’s a bad start to a day as I am now stamped as "BL**dy idiot woman who can’t even get to the convoy point on time and holds us all up"
Half way there the ambi in front of me suddenly coats my entire car in thick black goo and grinds to a halt. Everything from that vehicle is promptly piled into my car (whilst me and Lola vainly attempt to wipe enough oil off my windscreen so I can see where I’m going 
) and Duke is abandoned with dead ambi to await the pleasure of the AA.
So anyway, we are now running a good 45 mins "behind" and arrive at the event with a good chunk of time to spare to get people out to post, get my rig set up and settle rather than the usual interminal wait we usually have to do.
during the day I was radio comms officer (pompous title for the goon that sits at the radio and works out who’s closest to each person who wants our help and sends them - it’s a job that’s somewhat akin to juggling with jelly, you just think you are getting it under control and it all slips through your fingers…) I only had 5 people with radios to talk to alas though the Hayfield Mountain Rescue are on the same channel as us and have some serious power behind their rig meaning that I could read tehm easier than my own units and they transmitted over the top of my units with boring monotony (meaning that twice an ambi was delayed as I didn’t hear the shout and the unit didn’t think to wait for a reply, just assumed I’d heard) sigh.
Anyhow, on the whole it was a better event than last year even if we were an ambi down so the other 2 really did have to work hard so off we went home. Got home just as Duke picked up the phone - Harley was calling to ask where the dead ambi’s keys were, he’d gone to give it it’s last rights, sorry, to check nothing valuable was left in there. Duke had left the keys on top of one of the tyres (standard proceedure aparently) but they weren’t visible so Harley took big lumps out of him over the phone.
So now Duke is totally morose as he was already in Harley’s bad books for something or other (breathing I think) and I am pre-mestrual in case you hadn’t already noticed and managed to hit send rather than delete after a somewhat snide post on EYHE about Scouts being a paramilitary organisation (HUH??????) So I’m going to sit and force feed both of us enough chocolate to render us comatose.
