I began lifeguarding at the ripe young age of 15, and I feel like I have definitely got the job down pat by now. You show up to the pool with a gallon of water, and eight sweaty hours later you leave with every drop of your patience spent. Lifeguarding is not a particularly hard job, and everyone's experience truly is different —
but the one thing you can count on is that the day-to-day troubles you go through are being felt by guards across the world. Some of the issues are an easy fix, but others seem that they will be the bane of your existence. So I'm taking one for the team, and standing up for all lifeguards to tell the world what they need to hear.1. We don't like the rule breakers.
It's nothing personal, we know that they are just at the pool to have fun. But when I have to yell at the same little boy 17 times in two hours for having his sister in an underwater choke hold, I feel like the bad guy, when in all reality they probably shouldn't be attempting murder in the first place.
2. Your "swim experience" does not make you exempt from the rules.
Hey you swam? Me too! Which means that you know to do a feet first entry in shallow water. Dive in the deep end. I seriously don't care if you are an Olympic diver. You will most likely hit your head, and I will have to backboard you in three feet of water, and that just sounds embarrassing, right?
3. Most rules come from a serious accident, not our imagination.
There are reasons behind every rule, some may seem silly, but not to the kid who broke his nose against someone's shin as they dove over his head.
4. If we say get out, GET OUT.
Again, if we clear the pool there is a reason. A pretty good one in fact, meaning you might even want to listen to us. For example: explosive diarrhea, thunder-insinuating a nearby storm, or better yet lightning from said storm that is nearly one million times more likely to strike (and kill) you when you are in a body of water.
5. Clean up after yourselves.
I'm not sure where most pool patrons forgot their manners, but I guess it was somewhere off deck. Maybe visiting adults look at the young workers and think that we owe them something. News flash — we don't. If your kid spills ice cream all over your table, clean it, or at least tell someone before it thickens to an undetachable gook. And don't get me started on the tanners —
you know, the people that come and tan until they fry? Please, move your chair every hour to follow the sun and then leave it 27 yards from its' original position (sense the sarcasm).6. Some things are out of our control.
There is an unbelievably long list of complaints that the average lifeguard will get in a day including but not limited to: the water is too hot, the water is too cold, the water is too "chlorine-y," there is not enough shade, the (unaffiliated) snack bar's prices are too high, the cost of admission is too high, the chairs aren't comfortable, and so on and so forth. Just please understand that one, you are at an outdoor establishment and we cannot control the temperature or weather, and two, we are just lifeguards who have little to no control over most things.
Now that I've gotten all of that off of my chest, let me just say being a life guard is pretty rad. It's a great way to spend the summer, get a tan, meet all kinds of wonderful people and just have fun. Also, just a disclaimer I wholeheartedly love most of the pool fam, co-workers and visitors!
