Day Twenty-One: Handicapping Classic

Saturday was the day we had been warned about -- the Handicapping Classic. Apparently, it was supposed to be the worst day for us considering all the people who would be asking questions and would be upset about losing out on the $8,000 and the trip to Vegas.
I arrived at 9:30am, with a missed call on my phone from Darrell. I tried calling him back but, since he never answers and didn't answer once again, I went ahead upstairs and started stuffing envelopes again. Molly texted me that there was an accident and she would be a few minutes late, but I told her not to worry since Darrell wasn't answering his phone. About twenty minutes later, she texts me again saying that Darrell told her to go straight to the Jockey Club, where the Handicapping Classic would be held. When I walked down there, Darrell, Molly, Pete, Peter, and Jerry T. were all gathered around a table having a meeting. Darrell looked at me in complete disbelief, pointed at his wrist, and whistled as everyone looked my way. Before I could say anything, Molly told him I'd been upstairs for a half hour and had been trying to call him. He got a little nicer and said "Oh, well, you missed the meeting," but I'm sure I looked like the dumb intern who couldn't follow direction. I wish Molly and I had been informed of a 'meeting.' Jerry T. tried to give me a low-down of what was going on that day, but I was still completely confused and Molly wasn't too sure of what was going on, either.
I went back up to the Press Box and had to get scratches/changes put up online as soon as possible. Once those were up, I printed out a page and Darrell made copies of them to give to the handicappers so they would know the scratches and changes ahead of time. After that, I went to the Jockey Club and helped Jerry T. greet people. He kept saying how important confidence was and how I had the look but was too shy and, because I have anywhere from -5% to 2% confidence on any given day, that wasn't too encouraging. But we got into a system of welcoming people, always asking where they were from and telling them the layout of the Jockey Club. Every person I went up to was angry about something...one lady was weirded out that I asked where she was from, another was upset that he was a horseman and couldn't sit in the horsemen's section because he didn't bring his license, another couldn't find a table with an internet hook-up, etc. But as much as I hated it, I had to be down there because I was waiting on the betting tellers to come in. Once they got in, I had to get 100 copies each of the scratches at Belmont and Monmouth, since they would also be betting the races there for the contest.
After that was taken care of and after a lot of running around for people who had torn up betting slips accidently or lost their ID numbers, I unhooked the printer from the press box and brought it down so that Ryan could use it for the day.
Once bets started coming in, we had to organize the registration numbers numerically and get them into the right piles. My job for the day was reading the registration numbers and the horses they chose to Ryan so that he could insert them into the computer. It's difficult to explain, but it was very difficult keeping everything together. The handicappers had to bet on six mandatory Colonial races, so those were the worst because we had 250 bets coming in all at once. Otherwise, the races were optional and they weren't so bad. So for the entire day, I sat beside Ryan and read out numbers: "31 - 5," "67 - 8," "101 - 11." My voice was practically gone by the end of the day, since we were going nonstop with the exception of maybe twenty minutes. Ryan and I also ran into a couple issues where Molly or Pete had sorted a bet into the wrong track and we input it incorrectly or someone didn't bet a mandatory race and we were giving people the wrong horses because we missed our mistake, but we worked everything out. We also tried to post a leaderboard after every group of races at the three tracks.
By the end of the day, we were rolling and got the final results out within maybe 10 minutes. Ryan said that in previous years when Darrell's old assistant, Kyle, had run the contest, people were very angry and waited for results for around an hour. So Ryan and I ended up getting a lot of 'thank yous' from the handicappers and tons of people came up to tell us we did a great job keeping up with everything. It felt horrible at the time and my voice is a little gone as I'm typing this, but I suppose it was worth it. Three people walked out with trips to Vegas for the NTRA/DRF Handicapping Classic and thousands of dollars went with them and seven others.
After everything was cleaned up, Darrell told me I had to write a story on the two stakes that ran that day, so I went upstairs while Molly clocked out. I wrote the release (and the typo at the end is killing me), and I waited for an hour for photos from the photographer but none came. At around 7:30pm, I sent out the release to the media and clocked out for the drive home.