Road Marshall

I got a loud voice and I'm not scared to yell at people.

This past Saturday was a big weekend in downtown Albany. The first Albany marathon took place, as well as a bike race that morning. Clark & I both volunteered to help with the bike race.

I was a road marshall stationed at the corner of Front & Broad St. Basically, my job was to watch to make sure people weren't out in the road as riders came speeding by on their time trial.

On more then one occassion, I had to yell at people to get out of the road so they wouldn't get hit by the cyclists. One group of young women really had me irritated. They were all wearing the offical volunteer shirt that said "Support Staff" on the back. They were walking down the middle of the road when I yelled at them "Rider on the course, Please clear the road!". For some reason, this was funny to them. They came by me and said, "there's bicycle's on the road, bicycles on the sidewalk, where am I supposed to go?" -- this while she was eating free food from the event. I told her since she was Support Staff for the event, she could surely figure it out not to be out on the course. She rolled her eyes and walked on.

The other bozo that almost got clipped tried to blame me for his stoopidity. He came up from behind and started crossing the road immediately and one of the riders saw him as he approached and we both yelled at him to get out of the road. A man I'll simply call Ex-CandyCane saw this, as he was stationed down the road. He came up and confronted the man, who told him it was MY fault he walked off the curb because I didn't tell him it was ok to cross!

I was standing there thinking WTF when Ex-Candy called BS on that and told him to own up to the mistake and take responsibilty. After Ex-Candy continued to talk to him, the man apologized and walked on.

There is no lack of people in this world that will try to blame others for their mistakes.