Outtakes Day -3 – Iron Butt Rally 2023

Every year riders have the opportunity to grab some very easy points by simply completing Call In Bonuses. All they need to do is call the rally phone number, leave their name, rider number, location, last bonus collected, and next bonus planned. Simple, eh? One might think so. But history has proven leaving those five pieces of information is much more difficult to get correct while on the side of the road on Day 5 than it would seem from reading the instructions while sitting on a comfortable couch at home with the air conditioner blowing a nice 69 degrees. Bad connections, wind and rain, brain fog and fatigue can lead to errors and/or omissions. Making an error will be painful if not realized until sitting at the scoring table. To try to mitigate that, we set up the call in system a couple of months early, to allow riders to practice calling in, leaving a message, and then actually listen to their message for accuracy. Yes, they can listen to what they said to make sure they covered everything. Should be foolproof, right? Yeah, right!

The system is set up so that Jeff, Lisa and your scribe get an email notification of each call. We can read the transcribed message, as well as listen to the actual message, to determine whether all the required info has been provided. It can be very tedious listening to more than 100 messages several different times through the rally. But we always look forward to it because the transcriptions often provide great comic relief. In 2021, the rally staff started sharing some of these tidbits for your enjoyment. Yes, we plan to do that again. As you can see, we have added a separate Outtake news category for these, but we thought we would share the unedited transcripts of a couple of the practice calls here, for your entertainment:

“Calling Boneless Jack, name is Chef Vander rider number, your ID number is 5 7 9,… location, and Middleton, Rhode Island.The last bonuswas the beer fridge in the house.Next, bonuses, beer, fridge, the garage…,it is at eight o’clock in the morning.Andy Pedometer never moved in there.Thank you.”

Or this:

“Robert Bob. 1, 2, 3, 4,Ash Grove, Missouri.Loose, jet all the wash?Dan?”