For the past four years, I’ve been lifeguarding at a summer camp in my home state of Connecticut. I was a camper there before that and I now work alongside a few of my best friends who have returned as counselors. Most of the time work is fun, but there have been quite a few times where we’ve all come close to quitting. There have been plenty of times where we've had to do things that were definitely not mentioned in our job descriptions and other times where we just couldn't take it anymore. I'm sure you're wondering what I could possibly be talking about, we work at a summer camp. How bad could it be?
Well, for instance, there was one day last summer that I was lifeguarding with two other guards. When the campers were done with swimming, we blew three whistled and cleared the pool. We began cleaning up the pools and ushered the campers towards the shower house to rinse off. Everything was fine until I walked by the shower house and saw something on the floor in one of the bathroom stalls. There was a camper standing in the stall peeking her head out and she had what looked like mud all over her.
I wish it was mud.
The other guards and I got everyone out of the shower house as fast as we could and hurried them off to change. We closed the pool down and radioed up to our director who came down as fast as she could. None of us knew how to handle this situation. Sure, there's a small section in the lifeguard manual that tells you how to handle waste in the pool but this wasn't in the pool. It was on the floor in front of the toilet. We all stood around trying to figure out what to do, and eventually our director scooped up the "mud" with a dustpan and flushed it. We bleached the floor what must've been a hundred times and scrubbed it clean. But we still had our little camper with "mud" all over her.
So our director told us to hose her down. Literally.
They put her in the shower and rinsed her off with the hose. For those of you wondering, the hose wasn't on full blast, and asides from a little embarrassment, the camper was fine. They cleaned her up and sent her on her way. And then we scrubbed the shower house from top to bottom with bleach.
That's just one story, too. We all have plenty more where that came from. Like the time a camper bite another counselor and refused to let go, and the time one of the counselors got peed on. We all have our horror stories from camp, and we've all wanted to rip our hair out from time to time. But, for whatever reason, we all come back every year ready to make this summer 10 times better than the last. You either love or hate your summer job, and although it can be pretty crappy (haha get it?) at times we still manage to make the best of it.
