Empty rooms !

This morning was the time to check through the venue and make final decisions about which room should be allocated for which purpose - obviously the playing rooms are the main halls and are unchanging, but the offices have to be carefully looked at and decisions made about the layout - both for which room will be which office, and for the layout within the rooms as well. It is surprising to some people how much infrastructure there has to be and the different aspects that have to be taken into account. For example, the duplication room is very noisy, so can't be next to a meeting room. The vu-graph studio needs a lot of space, plenty of air conditioning (it gets very hot under those lights) and must be in a quiet area. The WBF meeting room requires a board room layout, the WBF office (mine, shared with Carol who is WBF Secretary and Christine who is Assistant Treasurer) needs space enough for all the paperwork, somewhere for people to hold quiet one-to-one meetings, and things like that.

The only room that isn't empty at the moment is this one, where a lot of the equipment is stashed awaiting distribution to the various departments as you can see in this photograph. This is all shipped in from Europe and the boxes you can see contain hundreds of boards for duplication, all the WBF laptops - about 80 of them - printers, leads, hubs and sundry other items. Two container-loads of material in total is shipped out to a Championship ... more if we need to ship tables and screens, but in this instance those are being provided by the local organisation.

The playing room is having the partition built to separate the Open and Closed Rooms, and once that is done the tables will be built and it will be transformed from an enormous open space to a very busy area - I will post more pictures of that later !

Many of the players are now starting to arrive and have a look round and of course lots of the staff members too - it is great to see them and renew old friendships ... for most of them we only meet once a year at the World Championships, so there is lots of news (and gossip) to catch up on !

Watch this space for more ... hopefully tomorrow !