Immortal Platypus

Ok, so we start at the beginning. A couple things are important for this story to make sense. 1) it's the beginning of the season, everyone is rusty or new. 2) there was a lifeguard on shift that I personally don't like and also don't think should be a lifeguard (it's not only me, most of the lifeguards don't like this lifeguard for a variety of reasons, but that's largely unimportant), and 3) every two hours on the odd hours (3, 5, and 7) we have a ten minute break where patrons clear out of the water and we do drills. Anyway, we can now proceed with the story.

Shift starts at 12:45, and the website we use to track hours isn't working so I can't get clocked in. That's fine, it's happened before, one of the managers or head guards will fix it when it gets up. Pool opens at 1. I go to my first rotation, and the umbrella on the stand (so we don't burn alive) isn't working, it's broken. Call a head guard, get it changed, easy. This one works. Everything's fine. Bad start to a shift, but it can only go uphill. Kids are being idiots, but it's not bad yet. This is just normal levels of idiocy.

Fast forward to 2:45. it's been a fine shift, things have been settling down, pretty average as shifts go. The guard near me watching a different section of the water calls a head guard who signals to get everyone out of the pool. turns out someone puked in it. So because of where i am at the time, it's my job to get the people out of the lazy river. we accomplish this by telling them to get out, and also throwing our guard tube across the river so they know not to pass it. most of the time this works fine. yesterday, however, some kids decided to ignore me (which contributed to it being a terrible day), and some kids just weren't paying attention (I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt) so that wasn't great. What I didn't know is that at practically the same time this was happening, on the other side of the pool, we had an active drowning (it's fine, the guard got the person, everyone is safe), so rotations took forever (which ate into my break time).

Now we're at arguably the worst part of the day for me. The 3 o'clock drill. I passed one of the head guards as they were talking to the off-duty guard and heard them say "spinal" so I knew it was going to be a spinal drill (a drill where the "victim" has a spinal injury). I didn't tell the others on break with me, cause we're not supposed to know. Sure enough, as we're about to rotate out, we hear the signal. And by "we", I mean "I". They didn't hear the signal. It was a really weak whistle to be fair. I was on break with a new guard (she was chill, I'll give her a break cause it had already been a hard shift and she also didn't know it was going to happen) and the guard I don't like. I yell at the new guard to grab the backboard (what we use to get people out of the water) and we sprint over to the area of the drill. The third guard is supposed to grab what we call the "crash bag" which is a bag carrying all the safety things we'll need (our AED, respiration devices, and importantly, the head splints we use for spinals). Guess who did not grab that bag, and instead rotated out and didn't help with the drill at all. That's right, it's the guard I don't like! I take charge of the drill when I get there (two of the guards are new, and the third one (who has been there as long as I have) knows me well enough to know that I'll be competent (she also might have forgotten some of the steps, I forgot one (oops. Remember, we're rusty)). We do our saving procedure stuff, blah blah blah, I look around for the guard with the crash bag. Oh wait, they're not there. So I have to get out of the water, sprint all the way back to the guard room (almost slipping and falling several times and almost knocking over a random kid), grab the crash bag, and sprint back. Crash bags are heavy, by the way. You also carry them on your shoulder, and mine are quite sunburnt. So I get back, and we finish the drill. Honestly, it could've gone a lot worse, even with us being super delayed from not having the crash bag.

I am in a bad mood for the entire rest of the rotation, and I worked very hard not to let it show to the patrons. That rotation goes by, it's fine. Next rotation. I'm off to the deep end. There's a bunch of boys roughhousing but I get them under control, and it was mostly fine, until I get to deep 4 (the last station of that rotation). that was mostly fine until at the end of the rotation, it's 5 o'clock, and guess who got drilled. me. This drill wasn't actually bad, it was just an active and was super easy. It felt pretty good, honestly. But then I have just a couple more rotations and my shift was over, and they go pretty smoothly. Then I'm done with the shift, and all is... well, not well, but it's not terrible. I was still mad about the drill at 3 though. that was the bad part of my day