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I can't say I was one of the Australians who covered themselves in glory at the Sydney Olympics. My competitive event was the marathon argument with blue-coated volunteer marshals, and I copped a flogging.
I'm sure the whole volunteer thing was amazing and wonderful, but if you're one of the 0.01 per cent of independent-minded punters who comes up against the 0.01 per cent of volunteers whose official uniform turns them into Little Hitlers, it can't end well.
My chance for redemption has had to wait 14 years. In Glasgow, I have promised myself to smile at all times, and to be honest it's hard to have an argument when you don't have the foggiest idea what the other person is saying.
Fortunately, incomprehensibility is made up for by sheer numbers. In my journey from the Glasgow city centre to the Scotstoun Sports Campus, where table tennis and squash are played, I was assisted by no fewer than eight different volunteers, or more if you include those operating in teams.
There was the man at the bus stop where I got on. There was the woman at the bus stop where I got off. There was the man who stepped up to guide me as I made my way from the de-bussing point to my next em-bussing point.
"Where are you going, Sir?"
"Scotstoun," I said, relieved to be able to answer a question, not just ask one.
"Sorry?"
"Scotstoun. The table tennis venue.'
"Eh, can't help you. My pronunciation's no good."
His pronunciation was absolutely fine. It was his hearing that was the problem. Presently his volunteer supervisor stepped in and piloted me the remaining 10 metres to my bus.
The encounter with the bus plaza volunteer hinted at another vital lesson, which is that many of the volunteers are not from Glasgow, and therefore, despite their inexhaustible friendliness and desire to help, they don't actually know anything.
The venues in Glasgow are not in Glasgow proper, but are scattered at magnetic monopoles around the city, as if precisely located to be as far from each other, and from Glasgow itself, as possible.
Directing you to them would be challenge enough for a Glaswegian volunteer, but for an out-of-towner in a uniform, of which there are thousands, if not millions, all they elicit is a piteous shrug and a slightly desperate glance hither and yon for someone who might know.
Which person does exist, but here's the Catch-22. The ones who know stuff speak Glaswegian. So if they can help, you can't understand. And conversely, the ones who you can understand, can't help.
Anyway. At the other end of my second bus ride, another volunteer bounded up to escort me to the next volunteer. On the other side of a two-lane suburban road.
"So this is the table tennis venue?" I said, to be sure.
"[Incomprehensible]," the man said.
"Right," I said, nodding.
At all times, smiling and non-threatening hand-waving is a perfectly good response to the Glaswegian volunteer. The language barrier can always be surmounted.
At the opening ceremony, when I couldn't make head nor tail of what the speaker was saying, there was always the signer for the hearing-impaired to make the message perfectly clear.
Having passed from the crossing-the-road volunteer into the safe hands of the 20-metres-from-the-kerb-to-the-entrance volunteer, I was remitted to the military security staff, who don't come from Glasgow and are therefore understandable, if limited in their expertise to the security screening tent itself.
Ask them where the entrance to the venue is, even if the tent is part of said entrance, and the response is akin to that of Buckingham Palace guards.
So from there, not any the wiser but getting closer, I was taken under the wing of the volunteer who took me across the futsal court to the volunteer who got me the last five or six paces to the entrance. In terms of gleaning information, we averaged one comprehensible word per volunteer, which accumulated to a complete sentence, so we got there in the end.
Funnily enough – and such is the mysterious yet somehow iron rule of the volunteer world – once inside the table tennis complex, I was left completely unattended to wander onto the courts, between and behind the tables during play, and, if I so wished, disrupt the games.
There were volunteers everywhere, but nobody to stop me from picking up a bat and having a crack for Australia myself.
Indeed, had I done so, there was every chance that they would have come up to offer me assistance. I suppose they thought commonsense should take over at some point.
Once I was up in my seat, a volunteer rushed up to check my pass. Then another squeezed my shoulders and said, "We're sorry, we'll get those umpires' names up to you as soon as possible".
The blank look comes easy to me by now.
"I'm not sure I understand," I said.
"Not an English speaker?"
I wish someone had asked me that before I came to Glasgow.
"I am," I said, "but I haven't asked for the umpires' names."
And can hardly imagine, in covering table tennis, I ever will.
"Oh shit," the volunteer said in a helpful way. "I thought you were someone else."
He rushed off. They're always rushing somewhere, when they're not standing for hours doing nothing.
I can't speak highly enough of them. No arguments yet, despite – or, more likely, because of – the language barrier. I am burying the demons of Sydney 2000. It's satisfying, and as far as I can grasp, the volunteers are great.
But you always wonder if the affection is, or ever deserves to be, mutual. A colleague was leaving one of the venues when he happened to pass a couple of volunteers who had sat down behind a barricade, taken off their hats and paused for a cigarette break.
"I've had a gutful of them," one volunteer said to the other. "I've f---ing had enough of the c---s."
My colleague rushed on, fairly certain of whom they were talking about.