Author Topic: [LEL17] LEL Suggestions Box  (Read 48818 times)

Planet X Paul

  • The Green Machine
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #175 on: 15 August, 2017, 05:22:04 pm »
No, not passive aggressive at all, as I queried this at the time when I woke up.  But the person on duty was not the same person who was there at the time I went to sleep and indeed came on shift after I was supposed to have been woken up, so I couldn't really blame them for the error. 

I realise that no system is infallible, and IIRC the system employed at Pocklington was one of sticky notes on a white board.  Whether my note fell off (wasn't sticky enough) or was accidently knocked off I will never know.

OK a suggestion....  could a bed allocation programme be written which shows a grid pattern of bed numbers where the wake time is entered against the bed.  The particular grid would turn red at the wake up time to reached as an alert to the person on duty.  I'm sure for a computer savvy programmer this would be a fairly simple exercise.

jiberjaber

  • ... Fancy Pants \o/ ...
  • ACME S&M^2
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #176 on: 15 August, 2017, 05:49:34 pm »
No, not passive aggressive at all, as I queried this at the time when I woke up.  But the person on duty was not the same person who was there at the time I went to sleep and indeed came on shift after I was supposed to have been woken up, so I couldn't really blame them for the error. 

I realise that no system is infallible, and IIRC the system employed at Pocklington was one of sticky notes on a white board.  Whether my note fell off (wasn't sticky enough) or was accidently knocked off I will never know.

OK a suggestion....  could a bed allocation programme be written which shows a grid pattern of bed numbers where the wake time is entered against the bed.  The particular grid would turn red at the wake up time to reached as an alert to the person on duty.  I'm sure for a computer savvy programmer this would be a fairly simple exercise.

Or even just an excel spreadsheet with a conditional format and a couple of macros! (as an idea)

I think the suggestion of some sort of standard operating manual for the key functions was already mentioned, and bed management might also fall in to that as well? 
Regards,

Joergen

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #177 on: 15 August, 2017, 05:54:15 pm »
And that if participants ride cold they wear more clothes.

Some people ride cold, despite apparently adequate clothing. Sometimes they warm better if given more fuel IF they can tolerate this.
Rewarming properly is EVEN more difficult with a tired rider.

Such multiple factors will have compounded and increased problems at Eskdalemuir

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #178 on: 15 August, 2017, 06:19:23 pm »

OK a suggestion....  could a bed allocation programme be written which shows a grid pattern of bed numbers where the wake time is entered against the bed.  The particular grid would turn red at the wake up time to reached as an alert to the person on duty.  I'm sure for a computer savvy programmer this would be a fairly simple exercise.

There were computer bed-booking systems in 2013 and this year. They get abandoned fairly early on, if people bother with them at all.

They seem to exert a totemic power over those who think that the model they have set up of the ride will be mirrored in reality.

What works best is a big chart on the wall which the volunteers and riders can all look at together, ideally outside the room, so that the options can be discussed in a normal voice.  I can see that the best possible option might be a stand-alone system for each control, displayed on an interactive whiteboard, and a paralllel 'dumb board' for when the computer system crashes.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #179 on: 15 August, 2017, 06:28:15 pm »
No, not passive aggressive at all, as I queried this at the time when I woke up.  But the person on duty was not the same person who was there at the time I went to sleep and indeed came on shift after I was supposed to have been woken up, so I couldn't really blame them for the error. 

I realise that no system is infallible, and IIRC the system employed at Pocklington was one of sticky notes on a white board.  Whether my note fell off (wasn't sticky enough) or was accidently knocked off I will never know.

OK a suggestion....  could a bed allocation programme be written which shows a grid pattern of bed numbers where the wake time is entered against the bed.  The particular grid would turn red at the wake up time to reached as an alert to the person on duty.  I'm sure for a computer savvy programmer this would be a fairly simple exercise.

Or even just an excel spreadsheet with a conditional format and a couple of macros! (as an idea)

I think the suggestion of some sort of standard operating manual for the key functions was already mentioned, and bed management might also fall in to that as well?

A spreadsheet solution was tried in 2013, and to be honest it wasn't as reliable as a simple paper-based system.  The problem with any software "solution" is the need to train a range of people how it works, and it only takes one of those people to make errors to screw the whole system up.

In my experience the simplest, and consequently most reliable*, process uses a piece of paper with half-hour intervals marked, and beds to be woken at each point listed on it.  Rider name and number irrelevant - all that matters is the bed (row and position in row) and time.  At St Ives we had the luxury of relatively few sleepers, so could group sleepers being woken at the same time together, so as to avoid disturbing others.  But the system worked just as well at Barny in 2013, with many more sleepers over two rooms.

* but unfortunately no system is 100% foolproof.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #180 on: 15 August, 2017, 06:30:07 pm »
The problem of riders being waking up can't be completely solved by changing the system which tells volunteers when to wake riders. Some people, myself included, can appear to have woken up (moving and responding to my name/questions), whilst still being fast asleep. I could easily sleep beyond a volunteers wake up call. Joth is sometimes very groggy after waking up and is quite capable of going straight back to sleep. One of the advantages of riding the tandem (and why single sex dorms are a real pain for us), is that we always have a second person checking that we're awake. We've yet to have a situation where neither of us has woken up.
On LEL we both had sleeps where it was difficult to wake one of us. At Coxwold both the volunteer and I tried to wake Joth multiple times and got absolutely no response. In the end I asked for another 90 minutes sleep after which we both woke up. In our room the following night, I slept straight through the alarm and took a lot of waking up.
Seeing the volunteers trying to wake riders at Thirsk the first night we slept made me think that it was probably the hardest task of all the roles. Without having dedicated rooms for each wake up times it's always going to be hard, and without having significant overcapacity, that isn't going to happen.

Emma
California Dreaming

Phil W

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #181 on: 15 August, 2017, 07:35:42 pm »

OK a suggestion....  could a bed allocation programme be written which shows a grid pattern of bed numbers where the wake time is entered against the bed.  The particular grid would turn red at the wake up time to reached as an alert to the person on duty.  I'm sure for a computer savvy programmer this would be a fairly simple exercise.

There were computer bed-booking systems in 2013 and this year. They get abandoned fairly early on, if people bother with them at all.

A spreadsheet type solution was tried in 2013 based on the ideas of one controller. It was abandoned.

There was no computer bed booking system this year.  It wasn't even attempted. Sure there was the ability for a rider to scan before they entered a sleep area and after they woke up and left a sleep area in some controls. But that wasn't a bed booking system in any form or manner. It was also completely optional rather than mandated.

For bed booking white boards and / or pen and paper and stick its work really well. If they have a matching process in place. The controllers and volunteers worked hard on this and making it easy to get their process right.  I slept in a sports equipment cupboard in Brampton southbound in 2013. I got my wake up call despite my unusual location.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #182 on: 15 August, 2017, 07:49:10 pm »
As the controller at Pocklington, I am sorry you didn't get your wake up call, I wasn't aware that anybody had had their wake up call missed. We tried to make the system as simple as possible as on Sunday Night we had 250 beds in the school sports hall & 150 a km away at the council sports centre.

We made the decision early on that we would only do wake ups on the hour & the half past as this meant there was less chance of other riders sleep being interupted as there was fewer wake up calls.

We did start to group wake up calls but this only partly worked as we started to get more times than we could split across the room. We were writing on the postit the bed & time & I had warned those volunteers in the sleep area to keep checking in case any postits fell off the wall, I think this happened only twice or 3 times in the whole week, & they were reattached before the wake up was requested. By using the postits it meant that as soon as the bed was empty it could be reallocated quickly, because as soon as the rider had left the bed we took the postit down & binned it.


CrinklyLion

  • The one with devious, cake-pushing ways....
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #183 on: 15 August, 2017, 08:53:51 pm »
So what I'm hearing from the people who actually have done the bed management is that computerised systems have been tried and found wanting. 

But I'm looking at this....
But the person on duty was not the same person who was there at the time I went to sleep and indeed came on shift after I was supposed to have been woken up, so I couldn't really blame them for the error.
...and thinking about the times that it seemed to get a little bit tricky at the controls that I was in, where there were generally two people on the bed management* generally doing 4 hour 'shifts' then handing over to another 2 volunteers and it seems to me that one easy win would be if possible to have two people on shift running the beds, but to not have their shifts start at the same time e.g. PersonA 10pm-2am, PersonB midnight-4am, PersonC 2am-6am, PersonD 4am-8am and so on...  so that you have a series of constantly overlapping people with continous handover rather than trying to handover everything in one go?

I do think it is the hardest job, and a really important one.

ETA - I dunno if anyone tried it that way, btw.  I've only ever done helping on a couple of controls with sleep facilities, so don't have a lot of observations to base a view on it!

* although obviously not me since I was busy refusing to take on the task because I don't have the skills - can't read charts, can't distinguish left from right, have astonishingly bad spatial awareness, can easily trip over my own feet or indeed thin air in a complete bull-in-a-china-shop manner, should never be trusted with an important piece of paper because I always lose it, am scatty and disorganised etc etc etc.

mcshroom

  • Mushroom
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #184 on: 15 August, 2017, 09:56:32 pm »
We were using a combination of the timed rows system and a whiteboard at Thirsk. The sleep area was the toughest job of the lot IMHO. I think we just about got everyone (there may have been one) but we had problems due to the layout where riders were going straight to the dorms and not passing the booking desk (which wasn't en-route), meaning we were trying to add other riders and finding their beds occupied, and that could get confusing when we then had to go back and alter the board.

Another problem we had was simply missing marking one person on a board because it was busy and someone took a note down to write it up later. The rider won't have known anything about this as we found him while he was asleep. To do so did involve one of the controllers Googling the rider to find out what he looked like and then us carefully walking the rows to find him.

In hindsight, our control could have benefitted from finding a place near the beds to put the sleep desk. I'm not sure exactly where we could have put it though. as it was a pretty narrow corridor between the food area and the sleeping areas.

Regaining control if anything goes wrong is difficult as you don't want to wake people. Those riders who left their brevet cards on display next to their pillows were incredibly helpful in that respect.
Climbs like a sprinter, sprints like a climber!

frillipippi

  • from Italy
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #185 on: 15 August, 2017, 10:09:50 pm »
I've always been woken up at the right hour, by gentle volunteers that used my first name (a kind way of double checking, I guess). Edinburgh, Thirsk, St Ives: thank you!

Just an idea, I'm not sure the pros balance the cons, anyway here it is:
riders might be allowed/encouraged to set their own alarms to, say, a quarter of an hour AFTER the expected wake-up time. In this way if everything goes right the alarm will ring while the rider's having breakfast/at the bathroom/etc., without annoying anybody. If a rider doesn't wake up the damage is limited to a quarter of an hour for the unlucky rider - and nearby riders being disturbed: this is the main negative side in my opinion. I'm not sure whether the pros outweigh it.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #186 on: 15 August, 2017, 10:26:02 pm »
Going to a computer program is kind of 'nuclear' option when the white board problem could have been fixed by using it as exactly that, a white board, rather than a dodgy post-it holder. The Great Easton team had one on which, for every half-hour wake-up time they had pair of rider/bed numbers recorded and a list of empty bed numbers. Erase a rider/bed pair when the rider was woken, rewrite that bed back into the available beds pool. Pen and paper copy when you go off on a wake-up round.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #187 on: 15 August, 2017, 10:35:22 pm »
I used my smartwatch to set an alarm, it buzzes gently on my wrist and I can't even hear it myself so won't disturb other sleepers. I also asked for a wake up call about 30 minutes after my alarm just in case. In the end I didn't need any wake up calls (although I was woken after about thirty minutes at one control by mistake!). I let the volunteers know once I had vacated my bed so they didn't try and find me to wake me.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #188 on: 15 August, 2017, 10:36:41 pm »
Brampton had a row of small sandwich boxes, each one contained tickets with the same wake-up time. Heather informs me that a volunteer called Phil refined the system so that the tickets in the boxes were sorted into a logical route, and groups of 5 were woken, so they could be checked out, and the tickets torn.

Obviously there was a chart as well.

We've got video of the PBP 2015 system, which had a computer element.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #189 on: 16 August, 2017, 09:12:54 am »
I used my smartwatch to set an alarm, it buzzes gently on my wrist and I can't even hear it myself so won't disturb other sleepers.

In 2009 I ended up day 1 at Thorne (not an official sleep stop, no mattresses, but the rugby club had a load of space in the bar area so people just slumped on the floor) after an 8am start and ~320km. The bar was shut by the time I got there so I opted for 3 hours of sleep. I set my phone alarm to silent and tucked it into my sock.

I was woken up by someone who was sitting near where I was sleeping (luckily they were already awake and having their breakfast) as they could hear my phone vibrating away and noticed I wasn't stirring.
"Yes please" said Squirrel "biscuits are our favourite things."

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #190 on: 16 August, 2017, 11:57:26 am »
I used my smartwatch to set an alarm, it buzzes gently on my wrist and I can't even hear it myself so won't disturb other sleepers.

In 2009 I ended up day 1 at Thorne (not an official sleep stop, no mattresses, but the rugby club had a load of space in the bar area so people just slumped on the floor) after an 8am start and ~320km. The bar was shut by the time I got there so I opted for 3 hours of sleep. I set my phone alarm to silent and tucked it into my sock.

I was woken up by someone who was sitting near where I was sleeping (luckily they were already awake and having their breakfast) as they could hear my phone vibrating away and noticed I wasn't stirring.

Silent phone alarms are anything but silent :)

hellymedic

  • Just do it!
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #191 on: 16 August, 2017, 03:19:57 pm »
Silent alarms are silent if resting only on the owner's body.
They are easily audible if placed on a hard surface and LOUD if on a wooden box.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #192 on: 16 August, 2017, 03:30:25 pm »

Mostly ahead of the curve so could sleep when and where we chose without issue, and luckily always woken gently and on time.
Did get woken by a wake up call next door which was either wrong or the rider changed his mind :D

(Also surreal experience at Louth going to sleep in a darkened room barely able to see beyond my assigned airbed, waking with adjusted eyes to a scene from cocoon of just a massive grid of beds & bodies stretching in all directions)

I think it was also Louth that gave me most confidence in wake up time as we were able to agree a wake up time with the volunteer bed booker, and see them write the bed number on the right page in the book before being shown to our digs.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #193 on: 16 August, 2017, 03:44:35 pm »
I was not woken up at requested time during last PBP. Life happens.

When at Brampton in 2013 I noticed that a beautiful machine ridden by Edward was still there after I had gone and done something else, too long I thought so I went in search of him in the hall.  Not knowing his name I managed to identify him by his jersey and hearing aid which he had removed.  He had longer than he requested but was fairly sanguine about it.  Life happens.

Still at Brampton, Iddu had more sleep than he desired.  He was a little bit hacked off and I think it motivated him to work hard!  Life happens.

All my sleep calls on LEL were spot on and the volunteers did a marvellous job and I now realise why my request was rounded-up at the one control.  Life happened.

Considering the chaos and wide variety of needs, coupled with the often darkened areas used, the occasional hiccup will arise and there might be much gnashing of teeth and stroking of chins.  I always believe that audax is a pastime where you rely on the generosity of the volunteers and if that is not 100% correct in 100% of occasions, then I adopt the 'life happens' approach and put it down to experience.

No doubt the wash-up will consider the success or otherwise of sleeping arrangements and protocols and might recommend a particular protocol or system.  I believe the system coped brilliantly and while it was not 100% perfect, it was very fit for purpose and the very rare blip should be acknowledged and accepted.

redfalo

  • known as Olaf in the real world
    • Cycling Intelligence
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #194 on: 16 August, 2017, 05:36:36 pm »
This was all effing brilliant. Given the complexity of the project, plus the fact that ALL of it is run by volunteers it deserves a Nobel price.

Louth run out of food? Oh well, on PBP 2015, people paid extra for their pre-ride meal, and the organisers run out of food before everyone was being served so riders had to start on an empty stomach. (Luckily I did not rely on the pre-ride meal but did my own thing.) And at the finish, it took them ages to get the really icky pre-packaged pasta meal heated, and it tasted like old rubber. Did I complain? of course not. If you want a 5 star holiday, go and book one at the Hilton.

Rider behaviour. I think some kind of ground rules need to be established (something like this: http://www.dereham.norfolk.sch.uk/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Violence-poster-2016.pdf ), sent out to the riders previously, displayed at the controls in various languages, and come with some penalties (swearing at a volunteer: 2 hours time penalty, physical abuse like throwing something at a volunteer: immediate ban from the ride....) 

My other half volunteered on the Thursday and Friday at the finish, and told me a few hair-raising stories. One - I think American - rider asked her if LEL Team could take care of a traffic fine he had received when driving to the start. When her sense of humour failed (she had done an 26 hour shift from Thursday, 10am to Friday, 12am), the rider's response was: "Bitch!" Sure, people are tired, but such behaviour is utterly unacceptable (even if you were not dealing with volunteers, but paid employees).

I can't understand why people get worked up about not being woken up on time. Ever thought how effing complex it is to run a dorm? Set your own alarm, and take the wake up service as an additional benefit, but don't rely on it. As everyone got earplugs, and the snoring and farting in the dorms is much more annoying than an alarm clock, I don't understand why people get discouraged to set their own alarm.

I think that Danial to some degree offers too much service, which then at times is impossible to provide for 1500 riders, and then leads to disappointments. In Loughton, for instance, there were way too few towels. Why provide towls in the first place? Tell people clearly: If you want a towl, bring your own (the lightweight camping stuff is brilliant, and dries out in an hour or two - one may even sell one LEL branded one in the shop beforehand?) or dry yourself with your used cycling kit (this may sound yucky but I can tell you from experience: it works amazingly well!).

I also don't understand why the jerseys had to be handed out by volunteers at the start. Force GB has an existing logistics network, why not let them post the stuff to riders? ( I did a couple of hours of volunteering at the merchandise booth in the afternoon of registration day - it was much harder work than rider registration , which I did during the morning.)

qualification: I doubt it would change a thing,  apart from increasing the organisational admin ahead of the ride. My personal impression was that I saw fewer extremely inexperienced riders than on PBP 2015. back then, there were an amazing number of riders on the road who clearly did not know what they were doing, and where you wondered how they ever managed to complete a 200. Failure rate on PBP was also much higher than in previous years, despite the weather being really good.

Moreover, on LEL you have examples like Fiona from Germany. She was MM start group (2.5 hours behind me)  and she first passed me between Edinburgh and Innerleiten, pulling two blokes who sat on her rear wheel up a hill. I tried to latch on too but decided this was too fast for me.
I met them again later that night just before Brampton, when they and others got engaged in a thrilling road race to the control.
I chatted to her on Thursday when she was pulling a train of ten or so riders through the Fens towards St. Ives. Turns out she was on her first Audax, and only scraped into the ride due to Danial giving women a preference on the waiting list.

If you can't convince, confuse.

https://cycling-intelligence.com/ - my blog on cycling, long distances and short ones

alfapete

  • Oh dear
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #195 on: 16 August, 2017, 07:42:04 pm »

But the person on duty was not the same person who was there at the time I went to sleep and indeed came on shift after I was supposed to have been woken up, so I couldn't really blame them for the error.
...and thinking about the times that it seemed to get a little bit tricky at the controls that I was in, where there were generally two people on the bed management* generally doing 4 hour 'shifts' then handing over to another 2 volunteers and it seems to me that one easy win would be if possible to have two people on shift running the beds, but to not have their shifts start at the same time e.g. PersonA 10pm-2am, PersonB midnight-4am, PersonC 2am-6am, PersonD 4am-8am and so on...  so that you have a series of constantly overlapping people with continous handover rather than trying to handover everything in one go?

I agree entirely CrinklyLion, one thing we would change for next time would be bed booking. All the volunteers at Barney understood what was required but put it into effect in a subtly different way. Shift changes were more than a little chaotic. However, I'm not aware of any wake up times being missed with us, though I stand to be corrected
alfapete - that's the Pete that drives the Alfa

CrinklyLion

  • The one with devious, cake-pushing ways....
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #196 on: 16 August, 2017, 07:57:20 pm »
I (sort of) understood what was required but my hour or two on beds in 2013 was utterly terrifying, despite the control being very quiet at that point.  I (literally) did a happy dance when I saw there was no bed booking on my rota because I know I'd a) be awful at it and b) find it unbelievably stressful!

Overlapping shifts is a thing that could help in a few situations, tihnking about it.  It sort of solves the training problem. 

I always think there's a bit of a conflict of interests really.  From the perspective of running the control efficiently and effectively it makes sense to give people the jobs they already know how to do or train them in one job and keep them doing that all the time.  But that ends up with people spending their whole time on bogs or potwash, which isn't really very fair.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #197 on: 16 August, 2017, 08:35:15 pm »
Speaking as a controller overlapping shifts would have been difficult to do with the number of volunteers I had and the intention to try and ensure that no-one got stuck on a task (one of the feedback comments from 2013 volunteers). Sleep booking and wake up is one of the hardest jobs. You are damned if you do and damned if you don't. We all tried to keep it as simple and fool proof as possible. As someone else has previously said - no system is infallible.

CrinklyLion

  • The one with devious, cake-pushing ways....
Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #198 on: 16 August, 2017, 09:49:32 pm »
Yeah - I can appreciate the logistics ain't straighforward.  And as I said several pages back

And then the one that is very much down to 'us' and not to 'them', more volunteers.  Although weirdly my 2017 wasn't actually as tough in most respects as 2013 was (having the school kitchen/cleaning staff, who worked incredibly hard, was a massive factor in this) that was proper tough nonetheless.  Many hands make light work...

More, and more experienced, volunteers would be a huge help, wouldn't it.

Re: LEL Suggestions Box
« Reply #199 on: 16 August, 2017, 11:53:40 pm »
Brampton had a row of small sandwich boxes, each one contained tickets with the same wake-up time. Heather informs me that a volunteer called Phil refined the system so that the tickets in the boxes were sorted into a logical route, and groups of 5 were woken, so they could be checked out, and the tickets torn.

Obviously there was a chart as well.

We've got video of the PBP 2015 system, which had a computer element.

I was that Phil, although I can't take all the credit, I was just one of nearly a dozen volunteers who manage the beds, 310 riders per night using 240 beds, it was busy & we needed to be well organised.

By the end of the 2nd night we'd got the system well refined and running smoothly - the problem is there's now a break break of 4 years before it happens again with a new group of volunteers learning on the job. I am planning to put together a "how to manage the dormitories guide" in the next few weeks which may help.

A few observations:
1. When things got really busy it was important to slow things down and do one thing at a time, this did mean riders were asked to wait a few minutes to be checked out of the dormitory or shown to their bed, but if you didn't do this you ended up not knowing who was where & in chaos
2. I know we had a few (not many) complaints of missed wake ups. Some of these may have been people who had been woken but went back to sleep although we refined our system so we went back to anyone who had been woken but not checked out. Some may have been riders who came out to use the bathroom and miscommunication meant we then checked them out by mistake
3. Riders from certain nationalities seemed to be much harder to wake up and more likely to go back to sleep.
4. I walked 10km showing people to beds and doing the wake up calls on Tuesday and the same distance again on Wednesday - my feet were aching by the end of the shift.

Much as I favour using IT where possible, for dormitary management a paper and white board system seems to me to be far more practical