On Tuesday, July 4, the first rehearsal was held on the Mežaparka Grand Stage by the large collective choir – about 15 thousand people. After the scheduled lunch break, social media was flooded with many complaints about the long waiting time for the meal and the way the food was served.
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In a conversation with Latvijas Radio, the organizers of the song festival promise to convene a meeting and look for solutions after the first day of rehearsals, meanwhile, a hungry singer, waiting for lunch for two hours, can calculate more than one improvement. In order not only to complain, the singer Katrīna from a Riga choir offers three steps that would help to cope more quickly with feeding many thousands in the coming days.
“Assuming that enough complaints have already been received, I would like to send three suggestions that were made in two hours while standing in line for the first day’s lunch at the Green Theater,” writes Katrina. We publish her story and recommendations for improving the situation.
1. The crowd has to be coordinated already where the crowding starts – and that is a long way before the entrance to the Green Theater. Already at the children’s campus, there should be clear indications about how many queues there are and what they are for. So that it doesn’t happen that after 1.5 hours of standing in some kind of line, you have to realize that you have stood for a vegetarian meal or, even more amusingly, for the toilet. I would like to note that the length of the tape marking the rows before the food serving tables was around five meters, but the length of the crowd was at least 300 meters. So 295 m (at least a third of a kilometer!) was chaos with no known destination. They are many meters in which all the inner feeling can go sour even before getting the much-desired pickle in the meal.
2. The distribution of food should probably be organized in several places, for example, in several tents, so that the queues are transparent and the movement is purposeful and understandable, and after each distribution tent, a dining tent is placed according to the principle – I got in line, took a plate, sat down, ate, threw it away dish and out the gate.
Speaking of serving – while standing in line, the sharpest among us estimated that one portion is assembled (several people assemble it) in about 17 seconds and it is served by an average of six teams at the same time (so six portions in 17 seconds). As organizers, you know better what the number of participants was, but it is not difficult to calculate that one thousand people would be served in 47 minutes, 10 thousand – in less than eight hours, and 15 thousand (the approximate number of singers at the song festival) – in 12 hours. Did all those who wanted to eat really stand in line? Perhaps we need not only more delivery points, but also delivery teams…
3. The flow of people in the food distribution chain must be organized in ONE DIRECTION. There was no thought about where to show the pasta to those who got it – with this plate you had to walk BACKWARDS to get out of the tent. If the serving tables were arranged not in a blocking way, but in the direction of the flow of the queue (similar to the checkout in a store), then a person, having received his portion, would continue on his way forward, forming a free flow, instead of becoming a burden to those behind and only hoping for his lunch.
Anyway, I stood in line (but only through collegiate choir members occupying a line further up the front) and the food was delicious, for which I am grateful. Thanks also to the volunteers who tried to answer the countless questions of those in line, even if the answers/order didn’t really exist. However, if you have to stand in line for this long (without “shortcuts”), it is not realistic to do it, and it must be said that then the catering will rather remain only “on paper” or as an activity on the calendar, which, like many other things, you simply cannot make it to. But you won’t be able to sing without food – at least not for several days. Or it happens that someone has to delay the rehearsal in order to be in time to take the place of the whole choir in line…
Therefore, a coordinated queue, several delivery points organized in a one-way flow (I entered, took, sat down, ate, left) AND EVERYTHING WILL BE FINE!
I hope that the difficult start will be a good springboard for improvement already tomorrow (today, July 5).
2023-07-04 21:09:51
#feeling #turn #sour #pickle #Singer #catering #Mežapark
