Summers, In the Past

My first real summer job in college was working for UT at their kids athletic program. Specifically, in the swimming section. My former high school friends in Austin managed to get me the job, and a place to stay, all on the qualifications that I was some guy they knew from Dallas. These people were, and remain, completely awesome. Ostensibly, my purpose there was to get my lifeguard certification and join my friend and roommate Brint in protecting the innocent tiny children from the drownings and the horrors of running near a pool.

But as anyone who has met me knows, I am far too out of shape to ever pass a test wherein I could be certified to save a child's life. I get exhausted climbing into a pool, several lengths of it are enough to send me into cardiac arrest. This does not stop us however, as I was given the most important job at any swimming school: Guy who sits out near the parking lot as ushers the small children to the pool and back.

Normally this would entail a near constant stream of child wrangling and insanity brought on by the every-half-hour waves of toddlers coming in to learn their dives and their paddles and whatnot. My summer, however, they allowed me to hand out parking passes to parents who would rather take the kids in manually than leave them in my care. In other words, to every single parent. Apparently, I am not the sort of person who is to be entrusted with escorting a child, even for 35 feet. I literally had a maximum of 2 kids per week that I would take charge of. So my entire summer, 11AM to 8PM five days a week, was devoted to me sitting on a bench in front of the gym, waging my own personal war against the ant bed three feet away and studiously working on my tan.

I also spent entire days doing ratio tests to determine the makeup of the summer campus population: one day devoted to how many people were smoking, one day for number of people on cell phones, one day for ratio of attractive to unattractive people...it was a long summer.

Other ways I passed the time:

• Playing the snake game on my cell phone: Highest high score is to this day 990. I was all over that game.
• Seeing how long I could hold my breath. I found that if I sat with my legs crossed on a bench and made myself as small as possible, I could get my endurance up to 2 minutes and 41 seconds on a single breath. If it wasn't too hot. This has yet to have a practical application, but I know that some day its time will come.
• Using the left over parking passes to build complicated origami animal armies that would march against each other until the passing students' stares got to be too much for me and I would throw them out.
• Doing the campus newspaper crossword puzzle. Which was actually the New York Times puzzle from a week previous. I got pretty good at those things, but slowly drove Brint insane with my questions about three letter words for African plainstriders.

Side benefits to this job included a pay rate commensurate with all the real life guards, for reasons that I'm still entirely foggy on and that still infuriate Brint to this day, access to all the free brightly colored summer sports school shirts that I could ever want, and exemption from being picked to wear the sports school mascot outfit, which was a giant blue whale, complete with its own foam whistle. After all, what if some poor kid needed guidance to the pool area after 6 consecutive weeks of going there every other day? Constant vigilance, I always say. Plus, I heard the outfit was wicked hot, and older kids and frat boys would try to beat you up.

I consider that my one truly good stroke of luck, job-wise, and I've been paying for it with every job subsequently. Karma gets you every time, in the end.