A pool story

As promised...I'm going to share a really great story from my life guarding days.

First, a little history.

I starting out working at..."The Club"...we'll just call it "The Club" when I was 15 or 16. I was the snack bar girl. I'd give wet kids candy bars, nuke hotdogs and mop the floor. Fun. I became friends with some of the lifeguards...they told me how uncool it was being a snack bar girl...so I tried out to be a lifeguard. And by "try out" I mean, I actually had to prove that I could swim. I can doggy paddle like a champ. I can swim to the bottom of the 12ft deep end (would I be able to drag a body out...questionable). During "try outs" we ("we" meaning the other lifeguard hopefuls and my bestie) had to swim...like a person, not a dog, a few laps back and forth without stopping. HA. Each time the lady would turn around I remember looking at my friend, dying laughing and running through the water until she would turn back around.

I passed the lifeguard test.

Most of the days were spent on the lifeguard chair, bathing suit straps pulled down around my shoulders...catchin' rays. There is a water slide at The Club. I HATED being at the post near that slide. Luckily, if the kid reached the bottom of the slide and suddenly realized they couldn't swim, the current of the slide would push them to the side of the pool where I'd be waiting to reach in a pull 'um out. No need to jump in unnecessarily!

Life was good...until the dreaded annual 5th Grade Pool Party. A local school would rent out the pool after 5th grade graduation and THE ENTIRE 5TH GRADE CLASS WOULD COME SWIMMING. A really bad idea. Just imagine the chaos. Each year, before they would arrive, we'd have a guard meeting to talk about what to do with the handfuls of kids that don't know how to swim.My friend and I made a deal, if she saw me jump in to make a save, she'd come over to me to help and vice versa. Well, she was on her post guarding the deep end and I was at a post right next to her in the 4ft area. All of a sudden, I hear her whistle blow....I look over...she looks down at the kid bobbing up and down...she looks over at me in terror...she jumps in...t shirt, shorts, whistle, sunglasses and float...and I'm frozen. Do I run over to her like we'd planned...like we'd been trained to do. Hell no. I sit there...in my chair...eyes popping out of my head as she struggles to pull this huge 5th grader out of the pool alone. Needless to say, she was rightfully pissed off at me.

If I'm boring you, you can stop reading now.
But while I'm on this topic...

We had to wear full piece bathing suits. After 3 years of wearing them, my friend asks the manager if we can have speedo bikinis the next year. His response..."we'll see after you girls get back from college...you might have to try them on and I'll be the judge of that..."  Ew.

The same guy also told me that I would amount to nothing in life because I didn't know how to turn a power washer on. Ok, POOL MANAGER!