In 3's

On wednesday I wrote a sarcastic note to a co-worker about her inability to take lane-ropes out the the pool properly. Nothing special, but I ended up drawing her diagrams about it and it took me about 1.5 pages and a reasonable ammount of wit. If only I'd known what would be meeting me every three days after that.

Saturday:

I couldn't get to sleep on Saturday. I woke up at 6:45 ready to kill. I got to work at 7:25. Being 5 mintues early usually pays off for me. But on Saturday no one is there to let me in if I show up early. It was cold. I was wearing shorts. The girl who was supposed to open the building for me was 20 minutes late. That's strike 1 for Front Desk.

She couldn't find the pool key. That'll be a strike for the dumbass Aquatics employee who closed the pool Friday night, having most likely taken it back to whatever farming community they were imported from by accident. I continue down to the pool armed with a maintainence key after instructing the front desker that I would be 20 minutes late opening the pool.

I get on deck and everything seems fine. I head into the basement to start backwashing and whatnot, and see that the makeup water has been turned off. This is the water the goes into the pool jets. No water in the jets means no clean water in the pool. A quick test confirms that the chlorine is hovering around 0 ppm. Strike 2, Friday night closer. I crank open the valve and turn to head deeper into the dungeon. But then I realize that there's still no water coming out. Did we forget to pay our bill? I run down to the numerous other taps and pipes in the basement. All are spewing water as per normal. I head back to the makeup water cistern and see that the tool who turned it off didn't just kill the valve on the pipe that the water comes from, they reached down beside the cistern and killed the valve on the pipe that feeds the pipe that the water comes from.

Flow was restored shortly.

I turn off the vacuum, get the backwash started, and fill the chlorine and acid slurries. All is well. I head upstairs and as I'm exiting the basement and passing the deep end, I notice a whole bunch of little brown smudges in the bottom of the deep end. Normally I would disregard it as dirt (the vacuum is self-propelled, and usually ends up propelling itself onto a floor drain every night before it's cleaned the whole pool), but given the chlorine situation, I decide it's better not to tempt fate. Even with no makeup water the pool still should have had some makeup water in it that morning. A big diffuse shit sitting on the bottom all night, however, would probably get rid of that and then some pretty handily. With 5 minutes to go until I was supposed to open the pool, I phone up to front desk and tell the girl that we're going to be closed until 10. The CDC has strict guidelines on how long to close for a fouling, and those guidelines are based on the chlorine level at the time the fouling is discovered. Once again, that means 0 in this case. This is strike 3 for last night's closing guard, and god-damn are they going to be out when I'm through with them.

I get out the skimmer and make to shovel some shit. Trouble is, it's breaking up into little shit-clouds as soon as I touch it. This worries me. For a solid fouling we use the CDC's guidelines. For a liquid fouling we close immediately and stay closed for a 16 hour minimum. I'm not sure what the difference is, so I phone my boss. At 8:20am on Saturday. He tells me 2 important things. 1) He reaffirms what I'd thought, that it looked a lot like sand washed back up from the filters. It's clouding behaviour was also consistent with sand. 2) That the difference between a solid and a liquid fouling is the presence of cryptosporidium in the stool. A solid fouling will never have crypto contamination, but no one wants to take a chance with a liquid one. However, given the lack of chlorine in the water he tells me that I was right to close the pool and that I should keep me eye on the chlorine levels.

Reasonably sure that I'm now dealing with a bunch of sand I take the skimmer and scrub it all off the bottom so that I don't have people telling me all day that there's shit all over the place.

Then

As I'm walking back to my chair to sit down and sleep for 1.5 hours

I decide to take the long way

And there in the shallow end

Is a huge log of shit. Pressed into the floor.

After cleaning that, I sit down to the task at hand. A vitriol-filled full-page note in the communications book. But before I can get to that, what do I see? A reply to my former note from it's intended mark. A reply stating that she has words for me that "cannot be wrote" and that the way she does the ropes is perfectly fine. I now add a few lines aimed back at her to the note forming in my head. Dark storms of caustic sarcasm brewed in my thoughts while the lighning of my wit flashed between them. I decided to pick on the easy target first. I informed lane-rope girl that I wouldn't have stayed late and used a page-and-a-half of the book if I thought her job on the ropes was peachy-keen. I then suggested that she learn her verb conjugations. Possibly by rote.

I went on to put down all of the slights that I had recieved that day, the whole thing just filling one entire page. Then I realized that I didn't have a fork to eat my lunch with.

Today (Tuesday):

I came in today feeling very tired, but not particularily iritable. The night-janitor was working the front desk. He hands me the key and says, "They left a nice one for you down there, eh?"

"Sorry?"

"Oh, no one called to tell you? They had a fouling and closed early. They left all the stuff from lessons in the pool."

"Oh. Awsome."

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck.

Well, they hadn't left everything in the water. To be precise, they'd taken out all the toys and cleaned them (and then left them in a big pile by the deep end), and left me with a) a lane rope b) the shallow-deep divider rope and c) an 80-lb, 6x4x3 foot aluminum table.

The lane rope was no problem. It needed to stay in anyway for the lane-swim approaching fast at 7 o'clock. However, the shallow-deep divider rope was tied onto it. And the table was just going to be a pain in the ass. However, I used a shepherd's hook to untie the rope (fuck, yeah I've got skillz!) and to turn the table onto its end so that I could pull it out of the water. I'm awsome.

But now the real problem: I have no more spleen to empty into the communications book. Also, my last 2 notes are seperated by one page, which contained the reply to my first note and something else unimportant. No one has written anything new since my note about how shitty Saturday was. How can I go and write another note about my shitty life when no one has put any space between this and my last one? So I swallow my indignation. I resolve to just be angry for the rest of the day.

Several hours later (around 9:15) I call up to front desk for a pee break. The woman who normally given me breaks has the day off. I call up to my boss. He's not there. He won't be there all day. He broke his glasses the night before and can't go anywhere because he can't see anything.

So now I'm forced to wonder: What will be waiting for me on Friday? And on Monday after that? I'll have the Thursday after that off, and thank the bleeding lord.