Chronicles of a Lifeguard: Chapter One - Mornings

Log start: 7:11pm August 11th, 2010

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

Ugh... 7am... I hate mornings.

The one thing about being a lifeguard is that the job is very physically demanding. For a guy that's used to waking up at noon for classes that start at 2pm, 7am is a very big difference. That means it's time to say bye bye to a lot of the usual late night activities such as playing video games past midnight, staying up watching TV sitcoms, dramas and movies, surfing the web, and my favorite college past-time, anything that invovles alcohol.
It's not that I don't like the job, because I love it. I love swimming and I love to teach swimming, i've been swimming since I was six and now i'm currently twenty-one years old. The most annoying part about the job is that the whole staff composes of college students, and the normal college student is definately not a morning person, especially if you live somewhere as far as Brooklyn and have to wake up at 6am, maybe even 5:30am to come to work in the Queens to avoid morning traffic. To me, that's just insane, I already think sleeping before 3am is blasphemy but to wake up that early every single day, I don't think I could of done it.
Luckily for me, I live about a 10 minute local drive away from the pool, so I get the luxury of waking up as late as possible and getting to work dead on time. If there are no school buses or old people in my way in that stretch of road, I can even make it in seven minutes, but what awaits you when work starts is part of why the job is terrifying and why you dread waking up so early every morning to drag half-dead body to work.
What awaits us at work are little devils that have an unlimited supply of energy if you water and feed them from time to time. Yes, they're children, cute little children that can either make your day amazing or a living nightmare, more of the living nightmare nowadays because of the sugar loaded breakfasts that they get fed everyday. There are so many little buggers running around and breaking rules that it doesn't matter how many cute little children you have, because it won't balance out the bad ones that you have to teach everyday.
Still, you can only hope that tommorow will bring a better day and maybe some of them won't even show up to get on your nerves. Honestly, those are the best days for me because I noticed that I spend the majority of my energy yelling and the bad seeds only to turn my head around for one second and they're at the same thing again. The days where my most annoying children don't show up are the days that when I get home, i still have the energy to stay awake until dinner time.
Of course, the children are the most predictable factor of your day, because after a few days, you know which child sits where on your piss-me-off-and-die scale. The most unpredictable part of your day rests with your own co-workers, the other staff that runs the pool with you. The mood of your day is ultimately the average of the whole pool staffs. If someone comes in with a hangover, you have to pick up their slack, if they come in all happy and giddy, you'll hear amazing stories all day long and everyone will have a great time, despite the annoying children. The team functions as a unit, every one of us works with each other at least once a day, we share joy, pain, and memories together, so the co-worker mood factor definately plays a large role in your daily overall mood.
You'll never know that'll happen at work. Someday you might get some poop in the pool and your boss won't even close the pool, someday there will be no chlorine and yet the pool still isn't shut down, and sometimes you'll get pushed into the pool as a prank by your friends and you'll be waiting for that perfect time to get a revenge shove into the pool. Everyday is a different story for the staff at the pool.
Mornings are a drag, waking up so early when you're not 100% used to it is a pain in the ass. Knowing that there are crazy and annoying children waiting for you at work doesn't make your mornings any better. The best that you can hope for is that your co-workers and friends will make your day better, or else you'd crack under the pressure of this physically demanding job.
The rest of the day will come shortly, now I eat my breakfast, hop into my car, and listen to the morning radio talk show while I cruise down to the pool where my 8 weeks of pain and sometimes excitement waits for me every single day.

Fun stuff.



HakoneDayDreamer, sleeeepy.