On Sunday the 10th of January, the Patriots hosted the Ravens in a playoff game. It was cold. That is until the fans got heated.
The official gametime temperature was 20 degrees, with 12 MPH winds creating an 8 degree wind chill. That's cold. And this is from a chubby, pale, German-Irish, genetically engineered for cold weather guy with parents from Boston and Buffalo and who went to school in central New York.
It's cold, but it isn't that cold. Certainly the playoff game against Tennessee was really that cold. That saw a temp of 4 degrees, and a wind chill under -10. 20 degrees is quite bearable, so long as you know how to dress.
As I mentioned above, I went to school in Ithaca, NY. It's 20 degrees in Norwood, MA as I write this sentence, and 13 degrees in Ithaca. In the next few days, Norwood will see the mercury hit 40, while Ithaca will see it peak at 31. New Englanders are proud of their cold weather (people everywhere always seem to boast about how crappy their weather is), but Central and Upstate New York is much colder, folks.
My senior year, in order to save $50 on parking, I walked the 1.5 miles to class 3 days a week. And in that frigid trudging through snow and ice, I forged an uncanny wisdom. I learned how to dress for the cold. And I'll impart that knowledge to you...
#1 Keep it Homemade
You don't need fancy thermal underwear or space-aged technology. You can dress warmly with clothes you already have around the house. Pajamas, sweaters, t-shirts, anything. You just need a lot of them, and need to know what/how to wear.
#2 Loose Layers
Tight is not what you want. You want loose. What you're trying to do is create a pocket of warm air around your body. A tight layer does you almost no good. Think about when you squeeze a sweater's fabric, it's not tight, it's loose and fluffy. You want your clothes to be the same around you. You don't want to be a blimp, but you want some room for air.
#3 Keep (the) Warm
Think of the phrase "Keep warm" literally. You want to keep your warmness. Coldness is literally trying to steal the warmth that your own body creates. The human body can easily produce 400 to 650 BTU/hour of heat. That's a lot of warmth. Unless contained, that heat will naturally spread itself until evenly distributed. It's called diffusion. Your clothes should CONTAIN this heat and not allow a single heated atom of air to escape.
#4 The Tuck Rule
An extension to #3. Everything, especially in the layers close to your body, should be tucked in. Pants tucked into socks, shirts tucked into pants. Think of yourself as an astronaut in the vacuum of space.
#5 Thin to Thick
The outer layer should be the thickest. The purpose of the clothes closest to your skin isn't to be thick and cozy, they're just supposed to divide pockets of air and keep that warm air close to your body. But the outer layers are for keeping the cold out of these pockets. So thick sweaters and coats over thin shirts.
#6 Sequencing
The order you dress is key because of the tuck rule. It's so much easier to have a properly tucked-in shirt if you put the shirt on before the pants. On Sunday, I wore 2 t-shirts, 2 hockey jerseys, a hoodie, 2 pairs of PJ pants, my cargo pants, and 3 pairs of socks (1 long, 2 regular length). But I put them on in this order:
1: regular socks
2: t-shirt
3: mesh hockey jersey
4: PJ pants
5: long socks
6: t-shirt
7: double-knit hockey jersey
8: PJ pants
9: regular socks
10: cargo pants
11: hoodie
And I wasn't cold. Just after half-time, some guy passing by scolded me: "Put on a hat, I'm getting cold just looking at you."
I smiled and smugly replied: "It's not that cold out." Because for me, it wasn't. Here endeth the lesson.
Back to the event.
Our response team has been a bit bored this season. We haven't had much to do, at least compared to '08. But as we discovered several times on Sunday, when you start noticing the absence of something, that's when it's presence will return, and return in force. Like when we noticed nobody was wearing a Wes Welker jersey. Our supervisor then said "Now we'll see a ton of them." And we instantly did, 8 at once, in fact. And then there was the guy with "Edelman (just for today)" duct-taped across the top of his Welker jersey.
There was a nice A-10 flyover, but all the flyovers this season have paled in comparison to Week 1's...
We started inside the bowl (inside the Stadium, not at a gate), and were busy early, almost as busy as the Ravens.
We were walking along and a woman approached me, declaring "You look like you know what you're doing, can you give us directions?" I do know what I'm doing because as she pulled her ticket out, I noticed something.
"Why does your beer have a cap on it? Is that glass?" She was cradling a 16 oz. glass bottle of Bud Light. She pulled it close and said "No, it's plastic."
"Yeah, no, give it here." She got a bit snarky after surrendering her bottle. I wanted to explain to her that we could've taken her tickets instead, and let her drink that Bud Light outside, but why try to logically explain something to someone who sneaks a 16 oz. bottle into a game, then with it in her arms, walks up to 3 security staff? Logic is helpless against this kind of ignorance.
There was a large group of Baltimore fans in 125/126, and we received reports of some lewd behavior after Baltimore's touchdowns. Normally, we're not on this side of the Stadium, but most everyone else was outside at the gates. Apparently, one Baltimore fan pulled his pants down and told some Patriot fans to "Suck it."
Shortly after that, we were walking by McDonalds in the South End Zone, when we saw the usher supervisor getting forcibly hassled by a patron. Interdiction time. What happened was one guy was drunk, and being dealt with by the supervisor, then his buddy tried to help him (there's always an overly helpful buddy that winds up hurting his friend more than helping him. Bit of advice: just sit back, let security and police handle a situation, then bail your buddy out). That ended with 3 people placed in protective custody by the police.
Just as the police left the area, we noticed a big guy standing by himself, with a messy tray of french fries, slobbishly slapping them in the general direction of his mouth. He was just staring at the jumbotron above the McDonalds as he struggled to feed his face. I walked up to him and asked if he was OK. No answer. I asked several times before he was even aware that someone was standing right next to him. When he did answer, it was a simple "I'm good."
He repeated that a few times. We asked if he was with anyone. He wasn't. He asked me if I felt good about myself. "Not really," I replied "We're down 21-0."
I asked for his ticket, and he eventually pulled it out. It was tucked inside a plastic sleeve on a lanyard around his neck. His license was in there as well, which made getting his information unbelievably convenient.
The whole time I'm talking to him, he's trying to win a staring contest with me. Now, this was a big guy, and maybe he's intimidated people in the past with this stare. But a drunken, glazed pair of eyes doesn't really irk me. It doesn't really do anything to me. I've played too much poker to backdown from a staring contest, so I just stared right back with my poker face. And my poker face isn't a stern, solemn expression, it's just a blank face with blank eyes. My poker face actually looks like I'm about to laugh at something.
Then he turned his stare to my supervisor. And it was a triple threat staring contest for a few minutes before the police arrived, took away his tray of soggy french fries, and accompanied him to the bowels of the Stadium.
Seconds after that, we spotted a guy struggling to remain vertical. He had a mustache and a silly blank look on his face, sort of like the mustachioed guy who dances at Bruins games.
I asked him if he was there with anyone. He said "Yeah... Mark." That incoherence was all I really needed to here. I then asked for his ticket. No response. Ask for ticket. No response. Ask for ticket. He reached into his pocket, and pulled out four $1 bills. Then the police arrived, and asked him to give me his ticket. He reached into the same pocket, and produced the same $1 bills. This process repeated itself 2 or 3 times. Finally, I yelled at him, "I don't want your one dollar bills, I'm not a stripper!"
Then the guy tossed the $1 bills at me, making it rain on my feet.
That was enough for the cops' patience. Another protective custody. A fan in the last row of the section adjacent to this yelled at me to pick up his money and give it back to him. Stunned, I turned to her and stated "He wanted to drop it on the ground, I'm not touching it." It's unbelievable that some buttinski wanted me to bend over and pick up his $4 that he spent in an effort to disrespect me.
A much nicer member of our team gave the money back to the man.
At this point, our boss came over with a call on the radio that response teams were going to have a very busy day. No shit.
A bit later in the day, there was another drunk big fella. This one had peed himself. That's all I really have to say about this guy.
We got some complaints about spit landing on the 100 level. I saw a loogie myself and didn't really know what it was until we heard the complaint. One of our team then spotted the spitter in the front row of the 300s. So we got a hold of the response team up there and the situation was dealt with.
Moments like that make me love this job. Someone was being a chump in our Stadium, ruining other people's days just for his own personal amusement, and now he's duly paying for that sadistic fun. I love aiding Lady Justice to deliver her comeuppances. In less poetic terms, I love helping people get what they deserve.
A few minutes after half-time, we do alcohol shutdown. What we do is ensure that the beer stands aren't selling, and that they've unscrewed their taps so they can't sell. We typically get a few gripes from people, but nothing too bad. And it's actually a fun routine.
It usually leaves our team scattered across the concourse, though. So me and one other guy were off on our own at one point. He spotted a potential drunk dude he'd noticed earlier. We watched this guy converse with his friend. He'd randomly take a half-step backward. What I call the drunken fallback shuffle. We waited until his conversation was finished. He turned around and essentially walked right into me.
We started talking, his speech was slurred. So we hailed the nearby police. I think it may have been the first time I've handled an ejection without a supervisor's help since my very first ejection, when I spotted a BC student at a football game with a beer and asked the EMTs to call over BC Police.
Well I guess with police there at this one and that one. I didn't technically handle it myself. But one of my bosses congratulated me on "Coming a long way" the last two seasons, and this was one of those instances where that was apparent. Two years ago, or even at the start of this season, I would've been on the radio begging for my supervisor's help. And this time, I just called it in. Our little baby's all growneds up and he's growneds up and he's growneds up.
During the 2nd half, we helped deal with a needlessly complicated series of events. It started with a woman being loudly obscene and obscenely loud and then involved more and more people for different reasons.
There was a trio of guys watching us deal with this profane woman. I asked them, in my best customer-service tone of voice, "Guys, let's keep it moving, alright."
"It's a free country," the Alpha of the group defiantly replied. I had to take him down a peg. I took a step toward him, and out came The Finger.
When I get pissed, I talk with my finger pointed at who I'm talking to. When my finger comes out, it's like the opposite of a dog wagging its tail. I'm like an agitated cat with its hair standing on end. I can't help it, I don't even realize i'm doing it until after.
With my finger firmly erect, "Well this is private property, sir. And I'm asking you to move along."
It was backdown time. I'd essentially told him that he could stay and have more words with me, or he could go. He wisely decided that watching some drunk woman blather on and on wasn't worth the drama. But as expected, he walked away with a 'tude.
"Alright, we're leaving."
"Thank you, sir." (lower finger)
With ample sarcasm, the guy got his little jibe in: "You're a wonderful human being."
"Thank you, I try."
I don't act like a jerk to people, and I pride myself on my patience and tolerance of stupidity. But I also know from experience that the fewer people that are close to a situation, the better. The fewer people making eye contact in a situation, the better. I can imagine that Staring Contest drunk, and what he'd do if there were 3 guys watching us deal with him. He would've gone cross-eyed.
I don't usually challenge people the way I challenged this guy, especially over the little thing he and his buddies were doing. But sometimes challenging someone is the best course of action, which is one of the many things I've learned this season.
The day and season ended with a big loss, and that sucked. But this season was the most enjoyable to work. We had lots of fun, tossed out a lot of drunks, and helped lots of people enjoy their events.
And reflecting on myself, I've learned tremendously from the people I work with. I've learned when and how to use assertiveness and aggression in this job and outside of work. I've learned the value of controlling a situation. I've learned how to control a situation. I've learned how to instruct people better. I've learned to trust my instinct. And I've learned how best to get what I want done.
And don't fret, there shall soon be some more Episodes to this series, probably shorter, or maybe collections of random stories. And concert season isn't that far off.
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