Hockey Shine Starts to Wear Thin

More coolers kept coming in the mail from drawings we'd won. Why don't I ever win drawings for... money?

They were actually pretty nice but I am the owner of a refrigerator.

The commute to these hockey games for my night job started to get old fast. It could take me an hour to get from Kirkland to Climate Pledge Arena, which of course was unpaid labor. It's completely my own fault for signing up for a job that's so far from home, but I don't think I realized what the drive was going to be like. To top it off today the monorail was closed so I think I ended up walking again.

I followed the tracks to the big needle in the sky.

There was some political discourse along the way.

Today the Kraken were up against the Buffalo Sabres. I don't think they play together as much because they are in different... conferences or whatever but I hope that I get to work a game against the St. Louis Blues.

They finally started putting more signage up in the place to help alleviate the constant lostness that people experience in this building, who then turn around and make that my problem by asking me a ton of questions. One challenge was that I always worked in the same couple of places on the ground floor, so my knowledge really got shakey the farther from there I got. People could be kind of rude about it if I didn't know the exact answer to every single inquiry. I got more that one "don't you work here" snide remarks. It got to the point where I stopped going upstairs at all unless I had my jacket covering my uniform.

I heard multiple times that the Arena was having trouble hiring enough ushers in particular. As the started hiring more they started taking over more of our role in the suites as well. This was nice because then we had less work to do, but at a certain point I felt like I didn't really have much of a purpose. The guests in the suites figured everything out eventually and then I sort of turned into a guard who just stood around doing not very much. My boss Agmar got meaner as time went on as well. I feel like she thought she was above us as a full time office worker, and we were just part timer grunts that she could belittle. This especially annoyed me as this was just a fun part time job for me and I wasn't interested in second class citizenship. She scolded me for leaning against a wall while "guarding" one time, and she scolded me for sitting on a chair in the loading dock because a guest might see me. It wasn't unheard of for me to stand 8 hours in a night, and sometimes I would work a few nights in a row. It would be kind of painful to walk by the end of the night, and it was especially jarring when I would wake up in the morning and my feet would still sting from the night before. It was definitely a humbling experience that has greatly increased my empathy for service workers. This is turning into quite the rant paragraph but it's reminding me of more annoyances. When we applied the arena company said that we would get meals provided, which ended up not being true. The concessions at the arena are outrageously priced, so it felt a bit harsh to expect these people to be able to afford to eat here. I got breaks but the breakroom could be far enough away from my post that it felt like the break was about over by the time I sat down. I was still having fun so I didn't think any of these issues were worth quitting over. Not yet anyway.

The usher people finally got signs and started policing the tunnel to the seats, making people wait until the puck was out of play out of consideration for the other fans. Well these were rich people who'd paid a lot to be here, and so were not always happy with being made to wait. More than once I saw guests just blow right past this request.

The guests were all kind for the most part but there was a huge power gap in play which I did my best to avoid. Agmar gave us lots of rules to enforce, such as restricting alcohol in the seats after a certain time, but I felt like I had no power with which to enforce. Plus I viewed my role as a facilitator of good times not as some underpaid policeman. I might inform people of the rules but if they chose not to follow them that was not on me.

Some of the suite's tvs had issues.

St. Louis has attractive women shovel the ice in between periods. The Kraken has multigendered people dressed in overalls like dock workers doing this job.

My day doesn't generally end until the last rich person in my zone decides to go home, even if the event is over. This provided even more time to stare at the wall and wait. I was amused by how many people left their beers for the cleaning crew to deal with.

Got Paid to See the Foo Fighters

My recollection is that the first actual event at the brand newly (brandly new?) renovated Climate Pledge Arena was Coldplay. I'd already seen them live so I bailed on that one. This isn't so much a job for me as a way to see shows.

I feel like they just assumed that I knew how parking/transportation worked, and I'm new around these parts so I in fact did not know. I ended up parking really far away and doing a lot of walking to get to the arena. The only suitable pair of black shoes I had were some dress shoes with a wooden sole I bought for someone's wedding. So by the end of the night my feet were pretty close to needing to be amputated.

At the very least, I knew I was going to walk away from this experience with a new word under my belt. I was stationed in the area between the seats and the hallway, apparently called the "vom". I had to look this word up and it's hilariously short for "vomitorium". Wikipedia: "In ancient Roman architecture, vomitoria were designed to provide rapid egress for large crowds at amphitheatres and stadia." So both vom and vomit share the same root Latin word meaning to "spew". I didn't end up getting puked on today so that was good.

I was pretty excited to see the Foo Fighters, and I was hoping that I would get plenty of time with them and not have to work in an area where I couldn't see the show. Death Cab for Cutie I've heard of but couldn't tell you any of their songs. One cool things with both bands was their local connections. Cutie was founded in Bellingham, Washington, situated about 3/4 of the way from Seattle to Canada. Foo Fighters are from Seattle and frontman Dave Grohl was previously a big deal for being the drummer for Nirvana, another famous Seattle act. I was excited to get some local culture to better understand and integrate into the area.

So our area was so fancy that guests had to use their ticket to get in the front door like everyone else, but then they also had to use it again to open the door to their private suite. All of the tickets were digital but some of these skeleton key tickets were printed for the staff. With this baby I could get into every suite door.

The place was a hot mess. It being a newish building with a new layout, no one knew where the heck they were going and hounded me with questions. In the depths where I work the damn hallways are black and there's not any signage, so that was difficult to say the least. I heard on the walkie that Jerry Bruckheimer was in the building. In hindsight I'm sure that I saw him, maybe even briefly spoke to him, but at the time I had no idea what he looked like so I was unable to pitch my blog as his next major motion picture.

In the suite's private bathrooms water was coming up from the drains every time someone flushed the toilet. There was also water coming up near some of the bartender's areas. We were having issues with the suite tvs as well. 

Guess what?

There were a few rows of temporary seating up against where the wall would be for a hockey game. An unfortunate aspect of these chairs was that they were all hooked together. So when one drunken idiot leaned back too far, 15 chairs would fall over at once, spilling drinks and sometimes people. There was an altercation when someone in the pit area kept jumping over the hockey wall into my rich people area. He ended up getting in a fight with one of the rich people and we had to have the police escort him out of the building.

At one point Grohl and drummer Taylor Hawkins switched places. Hawkins cajoled Grohl into playing the drum intro for Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit". It would have been killer if they'd played the whole song. Instead they insisted on playing some Queen nonsense. In Seattle. You're killing me.

Hearing “Monkey Wrench” really took me back. I think that this was one of the first songs that I ever downloaded from the internet onto my giant desktop computer as a youth. I probably saw the music video on MTV.

The arena is also home to the WNBA's Seattle Storm. 

One of my coworkers showed me how to take the monorail back to my car. It was quite a night.