Spring break manages to be exciting and lazy at the same time. What do I get for getting out of the house for an hour or so to run over to Powell's and pick up another piece of Robert Caro's anthology on Lyndon Johnson? Rear-ended, is what I get. Bah. Been avoiding the internet, too, althought we've been over that. Lifeguard recertification was it's usual time-consuming vexation.
About that. Every year, Aquatics comes up with some new thing that they think that we're doing wrong, and they come up with some new way to train us. That's fine; that's how it should be. The problem is that every year they increase the standards, they do a worse job of enforcing them. Case in point this year: when I took the re-cert class, I was introduced to Vigilance Awareness Training (VAT.) Basically, we learned that you can't see the entire bottom of a pool from one spot, even though you think you can. Ryan and I were feeling some righteous validation coming on, because we've both been saying for a while that we should be training our guards to get up and move around more frequently. We do it at Dishman all the time, and it works, no question.
But the part where they actually tell us how to fix the problem wasn't included in the training. So now we all know we have this hole in our scanning routines, but we aren't told how to fix it. Worse, we're told we aren't supposed to walk around the pool, even though we had to walk more than two thirds of the way around it to see the practice dummies that they threw in. It just doesn't make any sense.
And Monique, just in case you do read this at some point, it's still kinda up in the air. Working started to feel like, well, work, toward the end of last year, and I'm not all about that.
Posted by slade at March 27, 2003 09:19 PM