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Nov. 4th, 2013 06:03 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
erika_sanelySo I am running the Melbourne Cup sweeps this year at work. I ran it last year, but I gave half the money to charity; this year all monies raised will be going into the kitty, and first, second and third will feast like Kings!! (Well, less than kings. The most first can win is $60.00) It takes way more time than you think it’s going to to run a sweep, and it’s funny, because everyone asks who’s running it, and the people that will (the admin assistants for each area) are usually too busy to run it properly. Luckily, my boss doesn’t give me much work, so I have enough time to run it.
I’m always worried though when sending out mass emails at work because the General Manager of the mine is a weird fellow. He is not a people person – the previous general manager was brilliant. After sending out reports he would come around to my desk and joke that the numbers weren’t to his liking and that he would prefer that I fudge the numbers better the next day. And when the numbers were good, he would email me back thanking me for the results. In short; the man was awesome - and so I’m never sure if he’s going to complain to my boss about me sending out irrelevant emails to everyone (even though everyone would like to at least know that there is stuff going on around the place.) But the email has been sent, and the interest has been high. So high in fact, that I had a line-up of people wanting in on the action before I had even cut out the names of all the horses.
Sidenote – for the non-Australians in the audience, the Melbourne Cup is the biggest thing in Australian since sliced bread. It’s a horse race that used to stop the entire nation. (We still say it stops the nation, but the only place that gets a public holiday for it is Melbourne. The rest of Australia finds it disgraceful that they can’t take it off as well. Dammit! Why can’t everyone have the entire day off for a race in the afternoon that only lasts maybe 5 minutes?!?!) It’s race 6 at Flemington to be precise, but no one ever gets that precise. It’s just known as the Melbourne Cup. The first Melbourne cup was won by a horse called Archer. Archer also won the second. (and the horse that came second in the first ever Melbourne cup came second in the second ever Melbourne Cup. There weren’t many horses racing back then. It was in the 1860’s – people had things to do in those times and no electricity to do them with.)
Anyway, I’m organised enough that if I have enough interest, I can have 11 different sweeps going at once. And while that sounds like a hell of a lot of work, it is not. You get a person to pick a horses name out of a hat, and they get the horse for the race. And you don’t start another sweep until all the horses in the first sweep are picked. So the most you’ll have going with empty spaces and free horses at one time is two – the two dollar and the five dollar sweep. And once all that is done, there’s nothing left to do until the race is actually run. The first 2 sweeps are about three quarters filled, which is quieter than I thought it would be. I honestly thought I’d be up to the third and fourth sweeps by now. I did send out the email today so if people didn’t bring any money out to work they would have warning and remember to bring some in tomorrow. Tomorrow may end up being very busy in relation to the sweep.
