Today's installment of "A Lifeguard's Doody" is brought to you by the always epic, I-can't-wait-to-see-if-Marco-has-a-Phoenix-Zoan, newly posted chapter of One Piece.
A Lifeguard's Doody
'Cause Doody or Duty, it's nasty either way.
Incident I
I was lounging on my plastic green chair on the lifeguard tower and shifting uncomfortably as the vinyl rescue tube (which I OCD-ly always arrange so the "GUARD" painted on it is the right side up) slowly began to adhere to my sunscreen-coated legs. And, as was my wont, I was people-watching.
A man hopped into the medium lane, which was already occupied by another man and a lady who had split the lane. And this is where the problem began.
Lap lane etiquette isn't that hard to learn. You want to swim with other people, you tell them--better yet, you ask them politely.
So the man began his doomed quest to notify the two members already in the lane. The other male acquiesced nicely, but the lady kept swimming. And swimming. Not only that, she was swimming at a distressing speed that wouldn't stratify nicely in the pool's sophisticated "SLOW, MEDIUM, FAST" system and at the moment was causing problems with the other two men in the lane. Looking around, I saw that there was only one man in the slow lane. Solution: GET!
The new man tapped the lady on the shoulder, but she shrugged him off and kept swimming. Whoah. So I sighed and got off of my perch, waited until she got to the wall, and then tapped her on the shoulder. She did stop --which I took as a good sign, since it showed that she would comply with my requests, right? I asked her to move to the slow lane.
And she started screaming in my face.
"I'VE BEEN IN THIS POOL FOR FOUR HOURS AND YOU LIFEGUARDS HAVE BEEN MOVING ME BACK AND FORTH. AND I HAVE TO ADD TIME."
Needless to say, I had no freaking idea what she was talking about. And it was rather disconcerting to get hollered at when I was asking politely. But at least she moved. And, sadly, I was so rattled I almost wanted to cry.
Yet as luck would have it, there was already a man in the slow lane, also. When she joined HIM, he stopped her for some reason. Probably because she hadn't notified him about joining or something. Part of the fault for that could lie with me for not telling him myself. The next thing I know, she's screaming at HIM and pointing at me "SHE asked me to move here. So DEAL with it, old man!"
Wow. I run over to the old man, who is standing in the middle of the lane, looking rather shocked. I try to apologize, telling him that she's a little cranky and that I did ask her to move.
"She's a BITCH!" he cried. Wow, every single member I had the misfortune to interact with that day was not quite in a jolly mood. "She was here yesterday, too, and they kicked her out because she's a BITCH!"
I was sorely inclined to agree at that point. But anyway, it was all over. So I crawled back into my chair and memorized the lady's swimsuit pattern and the color of her swim cap (blue) so I could stay away if I ever saw her again.
All the OTHER lifeguards on duty had heard that lady, even over the screaming of little children on the waterslide. But of course, no one really understood what was happening. I chalked it up to the lady's pure crankiness and eagerly watched the clock for quitting time.
But right when I was leaving my station at the end of my shift, I started talking to one of my guarding friends. He'd heard about the fiasco with the lady, also. "Yeah, I feel kinda bad for her," he said.
Whoah. What? From what I'd seen, I would have been feeling sorry for the old man in the slow lane. Or the guys in the medium lane. Or me.
He elaborated. "She's got a kidney problem, so she has to swim continuously for three hours a day or else go on dialysis. And the speed she swims at--she's not slow enough to be slow, and she's not fast enough to be medium, so she's always getting moved around. And whenever she stops, she has to add time."
I mentioned the old man in the slow lane and his glowing reception of her. My coworker shrugged. "Oh, that guy. Yeah, he's the crankiest guy in this pool."
With all this spinning in my head, I waddled to escape the pool deck, excited to get home and watch Hannah Montana with a big bucket of ice cream to drown my confusion. I was almost at the door--
"Excuse me, miss?" I saw a blue swim cap and cringed mentally, but turned around. I faced an elderly lady with a kind-looking face. She wasn't much taller than me. "I'm sorry about earlier. It's just that I was in that pool for so long and they were moving me back and forth and--"
Well, we had a pleasant conversation after that, during which I assured her that I now knew about her condition and would watch out in the future, and her re-asssuring* me that I wouldn't need to do that.
So just remember, kids--most situations, no matter HOW one-sided they seem, could always use more perspective. I didn't appreciate Picasso before, but I sure do now-- in a metaphysical sense at least(refer to the title of this post).
On a side note, TWO HUNDREDTH POST. WIN.
*Yes, I know the actual word is spelled "reassuring." *props* if you didn't need this footnote to tell you the misspell was intentional.
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