All Taxpayers, Big and Small
Can't believe all this time has gone on and I haven't talked about my new job. The last time I'd seen most people, I was still complaining about the orientation. And yes, there are many things bitch-and-moan-worthy when you're a public servant, but I vow that I will accentuate the positive.
If you've caught my description on Facebook, the job is essentially what I said there: I teach little kiddies how to swim. And that's probably the remarkable things so far: in the abstract, I have this sort of curmudgeonly opinion on children (I think I once may have even offended a friend with a crack about having children to continue on my blood line). But consistently, each time I have found myself working with children in a personal setting (with Camp Puffy, for example), I find myself enjoying their company, at least for the brief time I work with them. The kids are adorable, in their own way - somehow, even the one with the lazy droopy eye who I know for certain will grow up to become Vincent D'Onofrio's character in Full Metal Jacket (he's a bit slow, and someone will torture him mercilessly for it; hopefully, he doesn't also lean how to shoot). I feel like I have a chance to encourage their development (in this case, as swimmers), and I suppose it encourages me to be a nicer person. I enjoy giving snark back to the smart-alecky ones and a hand and kind words to the ones who'd need to be helped along the way. Hell, I think I may even like working with the tots; most of what I do with them is trying to coax them into a desire to learn swimming and out of feeling just how cold the water is. Just the other day, there was a kid who just kept crying "I want my mommy" no matter how much we tried to help (his dad was with him, but somehow that didn't matter to him). And though his cries were shrill to my 20-something ears, they sounded rather like a challenge worth taking on, at least until mid-August when the teaching portion ends.
God, I can feel myself going soft... I'll digress before I completely wuss out.
The other part of my job, resumed daily after a long afternoon break which often consists of catching up on whatever television shows I missed from the day before or sleeping, is also enjoyable for a completely different reason. This part takes me back to the U.E.S., an area of town which I thought I could avoid after I had quit my old job. But I like that so far at John Jay the people are nicer, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that nobody has to pay (it's a city facility, paid for by everyone who shells out their dough for taxes, including myself; I know when my first check comes in I'll be properly fucked, in part by the government that paid me the check in the first place), so there isn't the "I paid $x to swim here" crap being flung at me when people don't get their way. That sort of thing makes my job a hell of a lot easier. I basically spend my evenings doing paperwork for about two or so hours: I give people forms to sign, and then I log their names, registration numbers, and the amount of lengths that they swam on that particular night. Some people do a little, and some people are like this lady I dubbed "The Iron Woman," 'cause she usually does close to 80 lengths a night (that's a touch over a mile, just so you know). I get to smile and charm people from behind my desk, while listening to my iPod, playing cell phone Tetris, or designing swimwear during the rare slow moments (‘cause Project Runway is on again). I do enjoy paperwork, as long as I'm left alone to care of things and don't have assholes breathing down my neck.
Speaking of assholes breathing down my neck, now comes to the bitch-and-moan-worthy parts: the office, with whom we must to be in constant communication, is unfortunately very incompetent. And if there's nothing worse than working with incompetent people, it's working for incompetent people. Whether it be a lack of the appropriate materials on hand, being constantly placed on hold when making the necessary calls into the office (we get a paid half hour for our administrative duties, but at my pool, we have to conduct that business from a room off the hall with no light that, by the time we arrive, tends to be filled with large garbage bags. I often make the calls from home because the phones aren't clogged later on and at least I have air conditioning and television), or like on Thursday when I was informed that "we lost your time card" in a voice that made it seem there was absolutely nothing wrong with this behavior, there doesn't seem to be a screw-up or inefficiency that won't eventually occur by the end of the summer. Conversely, God forbid, we do anything that appears even slightly off. My co-worker and I were berated the other day for calling in early stats in at 9:15 instead of the usual time of between 8:30 and 8:45, because we were busy preparing for the excessively large influx of children and parents coming in when there were just two of us at the facility. Silly me, for thinking that helping kids become acclimated to the athletic art of swimming wasn't the primary responsibility I get paid $15 and hour to do! The field coordinator also bitched us out for combining classes, in spite of my insistence that I had never taught that age before and hoped to pick some pointers up from my fellow instructor (and it's not like I was lying or anything; since I got my certification to teach, I've only taught about one 40 minutes class - they don't know this because it's not like they asked and it's not like I was going to tell them either). The parents didn't seem to find any problems with this, so to me it doesn't matter.
Also, I don't mind the 6:30 start time (the early job is only a few blocks from home, so I'm always first there even if I don't get there ‘till 6:40), but, seriously, the night manager needs to stop hitting on me. Now, it's not like he says anything threatening, so I don't think it's worth reporting as sexual harassment, but it is annoying. What's worse, I can never tell whether or not he's joking. In the first week, he has expressed that he had a crush on me, he wanted to ask me out (which he actually did later in the week), he wanted to marry me, and then he actually uttered the words "if she and I had kids" (I believe in that monologue - because I didn't justify anything he said with an answer - he also suggested that he only dated black girls, which I easily could have gone on with life without knowing). That's just wrong, especially when the fact that I've just gotten out of bed and still have some crust in my eyes is considered, and exponentially so if you consider that he's, well, old and sketchy. Honestly, this is what I have to put up with everyday!
But I trust things'll get better, perhaps when my check comes in. In the meantime, there's still the old familiar tone of my alarm at 5:30 am. And of course, that I still need work on starting my career once fall comes around. That feeling of being broke and useless to the world is not too old and way too familiar.
If you've caught my description on Facebook, the job is essentially what I said there: I teach little kiddies how to swim. And that's probably the remarkable things so far: in the abstract, I have this sort of curmudgeonly opinion on children (I think I once may have even offended a friend with a crack about having children to continue on my blood line). But consistently, each time I have found myself working with children in a personal setting (with Camp Puffy, for example), I find myself enjoying their company, at least for the brief time I work with them. The kids are adorable, in their own way - somehow, even the one with the lazy droopy eye who I know for certain will grow up to become Vincent D'Onofrio's character in Full Metal Jacket (he's a bit slow, and someone will torture him mercilessly for it; hopefully, he doesn't also lean how to shoot). I feel like I have a chance to encourage their development (in this case, as swimmers), and I suppose it encourages me to be a nicer person. I enjoy giving snark back to the smart-alecky ones and a hand and kind words to the ones who'd need to be helped along the way. Hell, I think I may even like working with the tots; most of what I do with them is trying to coax them into a desire to learn swimming and out of feeling just how cold the water is. Just the other day, there was a kid who just kept crying "I want my mommy" no matter how much we tried to help (his dad was with him, but somehow that didn't matter to him). And though his cries were shrill to my 20-something ears, they sounded rather like a challenge worth taking on, at least until mid-August when the teaching portion ends.
God, I can feel myself going soft... I'll digress before I completely wuss out.
The other part of my job, resumed daily after a long afternoon break which often consists of catching up on whatever television shows I missed from the day before or sleeping, is also enjoyable for a completely different reason. This part takes me back to the U.E.S., an area of town which I thought I could avoid after I had quit my old job. But I like that so far at John Jay the people are nicer, and I think a lot of that has to do with the fact that nobody has to pay (it's a city facility, paid for by everyone who shells out their dough for taxes, including myself; I know when my first check comes in I'll be properly fucked, in part by the government that paid me the check in the first place), so there isn't the "I paid $x to swim here" crap being flung at me when people don't get their way. That sort of thing makes my job a hell of a lot easier. I basically spend my evenings doing paperwork for about two or so hours: I give people forms to sign, and then I log their names, registration numbers, and the amount of lengths that they swam on that particular night. Some people do a little, and some people are like this lady I dubbed "The Iron Woman," 'cause she usually does close to 80 lengths a night (that's a touch over a mile, just so you know). I get to smile and charm people from behind my desk, while listening to my iPod, playing cell phone Tetris, or designing swimwear during the rare slow moments (‘cause Project Runway is on again). I do enjoy paperwork, as long as I'm left alone to care of things and don't have assholes breathing down my neck.
Speaking of assholes breathing down my neck, now comes to the bitch-and-moan-worthy parts: the office, with whom we must to be in constant communication, is unfortunately very incompetent. And if there's nothing worse than working with incompetent people, it's working for incompetent people. Whether it be a lack of the appropriate materials on hand, being constantly placed on hold when making the necessary calls into the office (we get a paid half hour for our administrative duties, but at my pool, we have to conduct that business from a room off the hall with no light that, by the time we arrive, tends to be filled with large garbage bags. I often make the calls from home because the phones aren't clogged later on and at least I have air conditioning and television), or like on Thursday when I was informed that "we lost your time card" in a voice that made it seem there was absolutely nothing wrong with this behavior, there doesn't seem to be a screw-up or inefficiency that won't eventually occur by the end of the summer. Conversely, God forbid, we do anything that appears even slightly off. My co-worker and I were berated the other day for calling in early stats in at 9:15 instead of the usual time of between 8:30 and 8:45, because we were busy preparing for the excessively large influx of children and parents coming in when there were just two of us at the facility. Silly me, for thinking that helping kids become acclimated to the athletic art of swimming wasn't the primary responsibility I get paid $15 and hour to do! The field coordinator also bitched us out for combining classes, in spite of my insistence that I had never taught that age before and hoped to pick some pointers up from my fellow instructor (and it's not like I was lying or anything; since I got my certification to teach, I've only taught about one 40 minutes class - they don't know this because it's not like they asked and it's not like I was going to tell them either). The parents didn't seem to find any problems with this, so to me it doesn't matter.
Also, I don't mind the 6:30 start time (the early job is only a few blocks from home, so I'm always first there even if I don't get there ‘till 6:40), but, seriously, the night manager needs to stop hitting on me. Now, it's not like he says anything threatening, so I don't think it's worth reporting as sexual harassment, but it is annoying. What's worse, I can never tell whether or not he's joking. In the first week, he has expressed that he had a crush on me, he wanted to ask me out (which he actually did later in the week), he wanted to marry me, and then he actually uttered the words "if she and I had kids" (I believe in that monologue - because I didn't justify anything he said with an answer - he also suggested that he only dated black girls, which I easily could have gone on with life without knowing). That's just wrong, especially when the fact that I've just gotten out of bed and still have some crust in my eyes is considered, and exponentially so if you consider that he's, well, old and sketchy. Honestly, this is what I have to put up with everyday!
But I trust things'll get better, perhaps when my check comes in. In the meantime, there's still the old familiar tone of my alarm at 5:30 am. And of course, that I still need work on starting my career once fall comes around. That feeling of being broke and useless to the world is not too old and way too familiar.