Long time readers of this site probably remember a series of posts last fall where I talked about my experience reffing and working at Raven's M&T Bank Stadium. Well today I had that opportunity again to work in Sports, this time at the Comcast Center in College Park, MD, for a NCAAW basketball game, Rutgers at Maryland.
My job today was working in the concession stand, really no surprises how they day went, but might as well share my experience anyway. The tip-off time was set to be a little after 1:00 and we arrived at the stadium at 10:00. Like most Sport Jobs, we provided shirts for the day (with the Maryland logo on them of course) and paper hats. For the first hour, we got things ready. We got Ice for the soda machines, set up the condiments outside, got the grill and fryers ready to go and stocked every cashier area with lids and straws. Starting about 11:00 is when the cooking got going, which was 30 minutes before the game started. My job for pretty much the majority of the day was a combination of fries and getting hamburgers/cheeseburgers/etc ready to go. As the they came off the grill, I put two pickles on each one, some diced onions, wrapped them up and sent them out.
One of the things I was amazed with is over our 3 hours of serving, I think only a few people brought back their food because something was wrong.Now cooking this stuff isn't rocket science, but none of us really had experience. I have never used a fryer before, but its pretty simple. After the halftime rush things started to slow down and then we started to clean up, scrub and mop.
The more interesting aspects of the day though were leaving and exiting because at Comcast, pretty much all “employees” use the same door. So when I left, after taking out the trash, I was leaving (still with the trash in my hand) with not only the security guards but also the players, coaches, etc. Because Comcast is not as big as an NBA arena (but still large for College, it can get up 18,000 people), when you exit on the ground floor, you can see right on the court. Its the same tunnle that the people who have floor seats who are famous use (for exmaple, yesterday I was there as a fan, and three rows in front of us on the floor was Jon Harbaugh, the head coach of the Ravens). All in all, it was an interesting day. My next assignment I believe will be being a walking vendor at Nationals Park if the group I am with gets a spot, that will probably be the most interesting out of all my perspectives. I might have pictures of this later, with links to my old ones.
