Now Hiring: Must Have People Skills

Lifeguards are supposed to be able to be polite, even when perturbed. Yeah, missing that quality. This was my Fourth of July at work. Yes, I wrote about it in third person, but I'm not using the ocelot. Yes, I was being an idiot. Warning: it's kinda long.

She walked into the lifeguard break room, drained already. Her family, wanting to take advantage of dad’s day off, had spent five hours out on the lake. It wasn’t as though it hadn’t been fun—quite the opposite, really—but five hours on the lake is five hours in the sun. The July sun. Now, why the sun, the source of all energy, found the need to drain hers was beyond grasping, but that was how things went. Now she looked forward to a further five hours in the sun. Except this bout also involved people.

Not that she had anything against most people on an individual basis. But in groups, on hot days, when she had a baby migraine, that was when people became stupid. Of course, that could be her perception. Or maybe it was just another one of those things: inexplicable, but true.

She looked through the break-room window and nearly wept. She could barely see the water for the people in it. What, had everyone decided to spend the Fourth of July outside, then come to realize it was at least 100° outside and opt for swimming? Some part of her, the part that existed in the courtroom of her mind as a defense attorney for humanity, huffed that it did make sense. But the rest of her, the prosecutor and the biased jury, didn’t listen.

Why couldn’t they all just suppose that everyone else would have the same idea, and avoid the pool for the sake of avoiding the crowd? Crowds, she had found, were the worst of it. In small groups, patrons could be managed with a firm, authoritative hand. Heck, sometimes they even learned from each other. The lifeguard told him not to do that, so I shouldn’t either. But in crowds…ugh. You got the worst of the worst, and you got it all at once. The defense attorney sighed that you probably got the best of the best while you’re at it, but who notices things like that?

What she did notice, when she went out on deck and took her place on her small plastic chair, was all the annoying people. The couples that didn’t realize they were at a public pool. The teenage boys who thought rules were for other people, and the things certainly weren’t there to keep you from causing harm to others or yourself. The hundreds of small, aquatically challenged children who managed to get away from their parents with a speed jet pilots would envy. The idiots who couldn’t grasp the concept that lap lanes were for lap swimming. The boys and girls who didn’t go to the end of the diving board before trying to do a front flip.

Peter, a high-spirited, goofy co-worker, appeared at the base of her chair. Time to rotate.

“Hey you, how’s it going?”

“I’m alive.”

That, she decided, was the best she could say.


Break time. The air conditioning caressed her sunburned skin, and she rummaged around in the cupboard for her cup. She could feel dehydration setting in. Water needed to be in her mouth within the next minute. Why couldn’t she find the blasted thing? It wasn’t like it looked like the rest of the cups. Yes, it was a cheap red plastic affair, but it was covered in permanent marker designs. She hated it when her cup looked like everybody else’s. Similarities made it hard to find.

“Where is my cup?” she wondered aloud.

“Ahaha,” said Paul. She turned to the boy on the beaten old couch. He was far taller than her, and had the grin of an imp on his lips. “I put it up there,” he pointed to some vague spot, “and Tim threw it away.”

“Gosh dangit, you idiot!” She snatched the first weapon at hand—her shoe—and hurled it Paul’s way. Surprisingly, considering her typical accuracy, it hit him square in the chest. “Why’d you go and do that?” Like he needed a reason. Paul was just mean spirited like that. He hardly treated anybody better than the ground he walked on.

Paul didn’t answer, but instead popped to his feet and gently placed her shoe on top of one of the suspended light fixtures.

“Get it down!” she shouted. Yes, she was making a scene. Yes, there were other people around. And yes, it was her own fault that Paul had a chance at her shoe in the first place. But that wasn’t the point. The point was, Paul was going to have to pay some sort of toll for being so utterly imbecilic.

“No.”

“Yes.”

“No.”

Whatever, she didn’t have the patience even to argue her point. She jerked a guarding tube off the ground and climbed onto the couch. With a klutz’s care, she eventually knocked her shoe down. Of course, before she could get off the back of the couch, Paul had picked it up and was running to a different light fixture. One far from the couches.

She swung the tube at his back, getting one of the best smacking noises she’s ever heard from a tube. But that didn’t stop him from depositing her shoe high above the ground.

“Paul!” He collapsed back on the couch. She reached for his sunglasses, but he held them at an arm’s length.

“Pull his hair,” someone said. She glared at the newbie guard. Was his name Matt? What did it matter? He was a new guard, and not a particularly good one either.

“No,” she said. There were some lows that she would never reach, regardless of the blood rushing through her already pounding brain. Instead she whirled back around and threw her knuckles right beneath Paul’s ribs. “Get it down already.”

“All right, all right,” he said, pretending he was giving in to be nice. But she had felt it, that inexplicably satisfying feeling when a punch hits its mark. He threw her shoe on the floor and she returned to the cupboard. She selected an unmarked—though probably not unused—cup and wrote her name on it. If she wasn’t so thirsty, Paul would have had to answer for the cup. She kept telling herself that, trying to drown out the part of her that was hurt that she’d broken her promise.

No one was harder on her when she broke promises than she was. And she’d punched somebody. Again. Yes, it was Paul. But it was still a punch.

The cool water quenched her thirst, but it didn’t calm her temper.


Everyone was finally out of the pool and outside the gates. That is, aside from the lifeguards. They were all scrubbing the deck and mucking out the locker rooms.

She snapped the foamer onto the hose. She didn’t see why it was so hard to attach the darn thing. Anyone could do it. Except, of course, Briana. Trust her to fail to see the obvious.

“There, Briana. Now give me back my squeegee.”

With her squeegee, she resumed guiding the—ahem—disinfected, yet still quite nauseating water toward the drain. She heard a clicking sound, and she instantly looked toward the hose.

Paul—not the same Paul who had messed with her shoe, but still a Paul—stood with the foamer in his hands and started for the exit.

“No you don’t!” she bellowed. Unlike many girls her age, she actually knew how to bellow. It helped that she could sing tenor. “Put that right back on the hose!” She was brandishing her soiled squeegee, and Paul backed away with his hands up.

“I thought you were done with it.”

“I said, put it back!” Who did he think he was? Hadn’t he been nearby when, last summer, she had devised the Thou Shalt Nots of lifeguarding? Number one: Thou shalt not rotate late. But it was closely followed by: Thou shalt not steal thy neighbor’s [insert cleaning equipment here].

Paul scurried back to the hose and put the foamer down with exaggerated care.

“Hook it up!”

He did. Then she stepped away from the door and let him pass. Stupid Paul. She knew she shouldn’t think that—Paul was nice enough, even if he didn’t always think things through—but she thought it anyway. Stupid Paul.


Finally, the locker rooms were clean. Well, as clean as they were going to get without a hands-and-knees, corrosive-chemical, all-out cleaning. And she wasn’t volunteering for anything like that.She hung her squeegee in the maintenance closet and started for the door. At the threshold, however, she found her nose inches away from a dripping, putrid squeegee. Not funny. The fact that she had pulled a similar stunt only half an hour ago on Paul didn’t even cross her mind.

“Peter!” she snapped at the red-haired boy at the other end of the squeegee. He wasn’t trying to be mean, she knew quite well. On the contrary, he was trying to perk her spirits, cheer her up. He’d been trying all day, and he was having adverse effects on her already volatile disposition. “Get that thing out of my face!” Most people would have been slightly hoarse after the consistently high volume she was using, but her voice pealed.

Peter quickly twirled the squeegee out of her way and she stomped into the open.

“Somebody’s having a bad day.”

She spun around, saw Newbie Matt’s face, and stood on her toes. Matt wasn’t much taller than she was. She held her arms slightly away from her body, flexed every muscle she had, and lurched toward him. “You know what?”

Matt cringed. “I’m not gonna mess with you.” He cowered away.

That’s right, she thought. That’s right. Don’t mess. She really shouldn’t intimidate new guards like that, but somebody had to do it. Otherwise they got ideas. A voice under her anger said that shouting at everybody handed people ideas, but it was ignored.

“You know,” Briana said from behind her, “you’d make a good character for a book.”

She was certainly put-out at that point. “No, I wouldn’t. I’d be homicidal, and the rest of the cast wouldn’t exist for long. In books, you can get away with killing people!” She didn’t mean that like it sounded, but she didn’t feel like adding a clause about at least getting away from your conscience.

She felt dozens of eyes on her face, but didn’t meet any of them. Instead she started on her way to her car.

One thing was for certain: she hadn’t made any friends today.