Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The Problem With Lifeguards

Martina Chione
English 101
7/10/2013
            Did you know that drowning is the number one cause of death in the world? That explains all the water, and it also explains all the lifeguards who do not do their jobs right.
The world of lifeguards is an unknown topic to society. If I walked up to a random person on the street and asked them what they thought about gay marriage, they would probably have an answer. If I asked them what they thought should be done about the problem with lifeguards, they would most likely be confused. Anything about lifeguards is rarely brought up on the news, or seen in a newspaper, until someone drowns. And then when the news reporter delivers the story to the public, they make the lifeguards and the companies look like they did everything they could. A better lifeguard knows that the drowning could have been prevented. Everyone should know that.
            While doing some research for a paper I wrote a few months ago, I found many stories about drownings that were under the care of lifeguards. They made the lifeguard company look innocent. The lifeguards did exactly what they were trained to do by the company. That makes it the fault of the company, not the individual lifeguards.
Drowning can be and usually is quick and silent. It is the fifth highest cause of unintentional injury death in the United States. From 2005 to 2009, 3,533 people died from drowning in non-boat related incidents. Children from the age of 1 to 4 drowned the most. Many of these incidents happened under the care of lifeguards.
There are five stages of drowning: Surprise! In this stage, a person begins to struggle at the surface but is still able to get air in their lungs. It usually lasts for around thirty seconds. Involuntary Breath Holding: after the person has tired, they cannot get up for air, thus being forced to hold their breath. Unconsciousness: this stage is exactly what it says. The person’s lungs begin to fill with water. Hypoxic Convulsion: the person has already taken in water and is unconscious. Puss begins to ooze out of their eyes, ears, nose, and mouth. Their body becomes rigid and their may be jerking motions. Death: when they have reached this stage, the person is clinically dead which means that they can still be brought back, but from the moment their heart stops beating, their chance of survival drops by ten percent every minute. These stages of drowning can occur all within sixty seconds. The person needs aid rendered before they pass the first stage.
If death is not the result of a serious near drowning, then there are other extreme results such as physical inability or permanent brain damage. Most parents do not know how to render aid to a child after they have stopped breathing. Some parents may not be able to get their child off of the bottom of as little as four feet of water.
“If you go to any other lifeguard company and ask them for a cup of water, they will bring you exactly what you asked for. If you ask a Jeff Ellis lifeguard for a cup of water, they will bring you a cup of water with ice, a lemon slice on the side, a napkin, and a little umbrella on top. When you tell them you didn’t need all that, they will tell you its no problem, they do it every time.”
When people go to a pool for a swim, they expect the lifeguard to sit there in the chair and look at the water. What a lifeguard needs to deliver to a guest is the quote about the cup of water.
            One reason that lifeguards may be so overlooked is the fact that lifeguarding has been so abused in the past hundred or so years. Strategies were never developed to ensure that a lifeguard was able to protect people at the highest level possible.
A lifeguard’s task as a first responder is to ensure the safety of the guests at a pool or beach, but unfortunately not just any lifeguard company does that. Before I became a lifeguard myself, I used to think the same as most other people; a person with a rescue tube is sitting in a chair, I am safe. My mind never thought to strive beyond that thought. But when my friend got me involved with the company Jeff Ellis Management, I finally woke up to the problems that are always being hushed. I realized the problem with drownings around not just the US, but the entire world.
A few months ago I found many stories on the internet about drownings that were under the care of lifeguards. In the stories, the lifeguards did exactly what they were trained and taught to do. In the end, the people drowned anyway. While reading these stories, I realized that the drownings could have very well been prevented if the lifeguards had been trained better and their supervisors were stricter with them. If the lifeguard company had had good work standards that were used with every lifeguard, those people could have been saved before they even passed the first stage of drowning. I was able to see the holes and flaws in these stories because of my knowledge of lifeguards. If every person in the world saw how a lifeguard really should be, they would be able to see the problems with these situations as well.
What was really sad about the stories is that not even the parents of the dead children knew what the real issue was. They blamed themselves and did not realize that their child should have been saved even if they were not watching them. The close family and friends of drowned people in these situations can be the strongest voices in the fight for better lifeguards.
While doing some research on this paper, I Googled drowning to see what I would get. I found many websites that described drowning, its causes, and ways it can be avoided. But not in any of them did I see anything about lifeguards as a way to avoid a drowning, much less anything about lifeguards who actually do their jobs. The world of lifeguards and its problems needs to be openly public. Everyone knows about cancer. With drownings being the fifth largest cause of death in the US, the problems with lifeguards needs to be just as important.
A person can go to college to become an accountant, graduate, and get a job, and they are an accountant. Just as well, a lifeguard can take the training, get a job, and be a lifeguard. This is not true. There are many lifeguard trainings out there who call themselves professional, but when it comes down to it, they are inaccurate, sometimes behind, and are not strict enough such as passing students who still cannot get something right. A lifeguard may have papers that say they have completed training, but that does not mean they are going to do their job right.
The problem with many lifeguard companies is this; if they do not have set specific and strictly enforced rules for the guards that are used at every body of water guarded by that company then each personal lifeguard will have their own level of leeway with themselves and other guards. This attitude rubs off on new guards as they join the company, and as the current guards work longer and move up in position, they also develop in their heads what they think should be expected from the lifeguards. Unfortunately, if a lifeguard was trained and disciplined wrong from the very beginning, they will most likely do the same to the new guards who come after them, thus loosing almost all manner of professionalism, awareness, and self control. Lifeguarding is a very important job and needs to be taken seriously by every company with utmost care.
I have had several experiences with lifeguards who did not do their job correctly. One of them was when I was six years old. I remember it clearly. I was at a pool in Oregon with my family and grandparents when I decided to sneak off by myself. I was wearing a lifejacket and decided to jump in over my head. As soon as I hit the water, I began to panic. Even though I now know I was not drowning, I thought I was at the time. I flailed my way screaming back to the edge of the pool. I remember the lifeguard yelling at me to stop screaming. When I did find my way out of the water, the lifeguard made me sit on the stand until my mom came out of the locker rooms.
Ten years later when I had my first rescue as a new lifeguard, the little boy was in a lifejacket. He came out of the slide and began to panic. He got stuck in the middle of the pool. I knew that I had to get that kid out immediately. Panic can still turn to something bad.
Why did that lifeguard in my situation not get me out, but yell at me and then sit me out of the pool? Whether someone was keeping a close eye on me or not, the lifeguard still could have gotten me. I understand that lifeguards are not glorified babysitters and that parents should watch their kids, but that is no excuse for a drowning or panicking child.
Many things can be done to take care of this problem around the world with lifeguards. In fact, there are already many things going on to help improve and ensure the safety of guests at a pool or beach, but it will never be enough until every swimming place has good and well trained lifeguards.
In Jeff Ellis Management, founded 2004, passing the training is no easy task. If someone thinks they can walk in there and wing the job, they can turn around and leave. While on the job, we are randomly tested with manikins and people fake drowning. We have ten seconds to see them and twenty seconds to render aid. This is possible because of our ten second scanning patterns that we use, always moving our heads and checking, and scanning with our arms every five minutes. We practice our lifeguard skills such as rescue types, CPR, first aid, and even guest services skills for up to four hours every month. At random, we are audited while on the job.
Ellis and Associates, another company owned by the same person as Jeff Ellis Management, was founded in 1983. This company does hundreds of thousands of pools and beaches all around the world. They are ranked one of the best lifeguard companies in the world.
Lifeguard awareness is being spread throughout the globe, but it still remains an unpopular topic among society. What needs to happen is for people to be as aware of drownings as much as well trained lifeguards are. The word needs to be put out to the public to see the lifeguards when they go swimming, to be aware of what risk they may be putting themselves at by getting in the water, and most of all, be able to correctly judge the lifeguards, not only for themselves, but for their friends and loved ones.
What should be looked for in a lifeguard:
--Scanning; visibly moving their heads along every part of their zone, especially the walls and corners
--Proper rescue equipment; rescue tube with strap on and ready, hip pack, a trauma bag with major emergency equipment, and a backboard for pulling people safely out of the water. This equipment should be found somewhere near the water.
--No cell phones or other distractions near by
--No fiddling around or goofing off; feet ready to jump in at any moment
--Not talking to anyone for more than a minute
--They deliver good, solid, and unsterstandable answers to any questions
--Drinking water is at hand
If someone would like to go further, ask management any questions:
            --Do you test your lifeguards?
            --How often do your lifeguards change stands?
            --How often are the lifeguards required to renew their licenses?
            --What company are your guards trained by?
            --Are your guards audited?
            --How often do they practice their guarding skills such as rescuing methods and
CPR?
            One may say that it costs a lot of money to hire a well trained and disciplined company that is also more expensive. According to the NCI (National Cancer Institute), $5 to 6 billion is being spent on cancer research per year. I have nothing against cancer research and am in all favor of money being invested in it, but why can not money like that be raised and invested in places to hire better lifeguards, or spent on lifeguard companies to be able to charge less for contracts?
            One may argue that you get what you pay for, and this is true to take into consideration with almost anything else. But with lives at stake, there is no excuse. One company may cost more than another, but one company may keep a lot more people safe than the other.
The job also pays in many other ways. I personally make nine dollars an hour which is seventy five cents higher than the minimum wage in Illinois. The amount of work that my coworkers and I put into the job, we could be fairly paid a good fifteen dollars an hour. But the responsibility and immense amount of experience that comes with the job is worth much more.
One thing that can be stronger than money is the power in the voices of a crowd. The more people who come out and protest against poor lifeguarding, the better. Towns and pools will do everything they can to hire better lifeguards if enough voices are heard.
The reality of a lifeguard’s true duties needs to be known to everyone. If a lifeguard is on duty, there is very little excuse for a drowning. They are there to protect the lives of the people in the water. The fight for better lifeguards should never end until the yearly number of drownings is reduced greatly.

Monday, July 29, 2013

The Real Backbone

7-28-2013

            Each day we go into work, we may fail to think of a wonderful lady known as Jerica. She is the one who holds us all together. She is the backbone to everything we do. She is the reason everything runs smoothly and properly. She is the reason we get to walk into work that day. She is our area manager in Illinois and she deserves a lot of praise.
            While we sit in that stand keeping our ten twenties and sweating in the hot sunshine, she is either in her office at the Vaughan Center dealing with paperwork and phone calls, from complaints to package deliveries to paycheck issues, or she is at her third meeting of the day. Whenever I see her in her office, she is on the phone or deep into her laptop. Sometimes she will have me do things for her randomly, and I am glad to help.
            A remarkable wonder about her is how, no matter what, when I walk through that office door either to talk to her or for something else, she looks up with a smile and a hello. She always makes me feel welcome. It is easy to spark a conversation with her. She is a wonderful person to talk to, even if it is just some problems from home or with some friends.
            But sometimes I can see the stress behind her work. I can see her smile, but I catch her sighing. When I ask her how her day is going, sometimes she says light and easy, but other times she has a load of work to do. It is that smile, though, that shows how strong she is, that she can handle anything thrown in her direction.
            Jerica’s wardrobe must be any other girl’s dream. She knows how to shop. She does not only dress professionally, she dresses in the perfect clothes to make her even more beautiful. Sometimes it is long pants with a gold shirt and scarf, sometimes it is a long black dress with a cardigan and a black beaded necklace. Her long black hair goes perfect with anything she wears. Most of the time, she puts it up into a bun with it pulled around her head rather than straight back.
            She just recently got married last month. I found her Facebook and saw a picture of her in her wedding dress with her Bridesmaids. She was so stunning I almost fell out of my chair. Her husband John is the luckiest man on this planet.
            Sometimes I hear people talk about other coworkers, and it is not always good. But if someone brings up Jerica’s name, everyone smiles every time because we all know how wonderful she is. She is always fair and she never lies. She goes out of her way to do something for someone for some reason.

            I think everyone should throw her a big thank you party for all the wonderful and hard work she does for all of us.

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Something Remarkable

Something Remarkable
10—11—12

Something remarkable happened last night at the Vaughn Center, the big athletic center in Aurora. I went swimming with my Mom as we like to do. I thought it would just be a regular normal swimming session, but an event completely took me off guard.
If you have read all the daily logs and articles about my job as a lifeguard from this past summer I wrote, you will know that me and another lifeguard named Britney, have always butted heads. We worked at Phillips Park water park together and we hardly ever got along. We got mad at each other for the littlest things and were rude. We couldn't accept each other's differences, and therefore we were all-out mean to each other. I don't know about her, but I tried really hard to be nice to her, but when she tried to push me around and bully me, I didn't let her, so I was mean back. We clashed. Everyone, all the other lifeguards and even the maintenance, knew we didn't get along very well. They all saw it.
There is a supervisor named Cesar, and he is the nicest guy anyone could ever meet. I have never seen him mad at all. He is friends with everyone and can't stand it when people are mad at each other. As I said, last night, I was swimming at the indoor pool where the guards work during the school year. Britney was working that night. I walked into the therapy pool for a nice long tread.
I sat on the edge of the pool, putting on my swim cap. I saw Britney walking towards me. She smiled and said hi and I said hi back. To my surprise, she came and sat down next to me and started to talk.
“Hey, Martina,” She said, “I want to apologize for this past summer. I'm sorry for being so mean to you. Sometimes I have bad days and I'm a total bitch to you. I am to everyone, and I don't realize it. I just have a lot of bad days. I really didn't mean to be that way. I know I was bad. It was all my fault.”
I just sat there, speechless. I couldn't believe this was happening. There was no lye in Britney's voice. And then I knew it was my turn. I knew suddenly that I had been being the same way to her all along.
“Thanks,” I said, “It was my fault. I know I was really mean to you back. I shouldn't have done that, always pushing your buttons. I didn't even realize when I was being like that.”
Britney smiled and thanked me. She wished me good swimming, got up, and went off to do some pool deck mopping. I am truly sorry for the way I treated Britney. I know I was a total idiot to her, and I wish I could have realized all along how mean I was and apologized myself.
Britney made my day. Now, I can finally have a clear conscience. I always thought she was a total idiot, but I knew deep down all along there was something more, that she could be really nice and really fun. And I know that she has her problems too from home, just like me and everyone else does. Maybe one of her ways of dealing with stress was to get mad at everyone, and she didn't even know, that's just how things happened.
What I honestly think happened the other night was that Cesar talked to Britney about me. Cesar knows my good side and he knows Britney's good side also. He also knows, because he saw it, that her and I never got along. I think Cesar said something to Britney about how I thought she was a really mean person. And of course, Britney really isn't.
I just want you to know how much that means to me, Britney, what you did last night. It means a whole lot more than anyone realizes. And Cesar, if that was you who said something to Britney about me, thank you. But especially thank you to Britney because I know it took a lot to do that.
Forgive and forget; it's magic! I forgive you, Britney and I'm sorry for the way I treated you.
--Martina

The strength in an apology and forgiveness is measureless, and so is the strength in thankfulness. After what happened last week between me and Britney, how things were finally mended and her and I can finally drop all of our grudges and anger between each other, I knew I had someone else to thank as well as Britney.
So today I was sitting up at the front desk in the aquatics area, acting as cashier since there wasn't one there at the moment. I was signing kids in for swim lessons and unlocking the locker rooms for people. Then, after I had signed everyone in for swim lessons and all the kids and parents had gone into the pool, I sat there alone, coloring a new picture with some Sharpie markers.
I had thought about doing it on Twitter or something, but I knew I had to do it in person. I knew the perfect moment would come.
Then Cesar came out the pool deck door. He wore his supervisor uniform, ready for his shift to start. He went into the locker room, and when he came back out, I stopped him.
“Hey, Cesar,” I said, “I have a question for you.”
“Okay, Martina,” Cesar said, crossing his arms and leaning on the high desk in front of me.
I didn't hesitate, “Are you the one who told Britney how I thought she was really mean over the summer?”
“Britney, who?”
“Britney, who worked at Phillips Park in the summer.”
“No.” That was the biggest lye I had ever heard out of someone. Cesar's eyes were lying, and it was in his voice.
He tried to walk away, but I wasn't going to let Cesar off the hook that easy. “You know, what happened the other night. Britney came to me and apologized for everything. Did you tell her how she made me feel really bad and I thought she was a total idiot? I honestly want to know, Cesar.”
He just looked at me and smiled a little. He took his arms off the counter and admitted it, “Yes.” I couldn't tell if he was embarrassed or if he was just being really shy or he just thought I was ridiculous.
I smiled, “Thank you, Cesar. That really means a lot to me.” I meant it.
Cesar just smiled and nodded at me, “You're welcome.” Some kids started to come through the door, and he really needed to get back to work. He held the door open for the kids and then went through it himself, going back to supervise.
I smiled to myself. Every part of what I had said was true and sincere. It was short and simple, but all I wanted to do was thank Cesar. Because he really did mend a lot of anger. He is a really good guy.
I don't know if Cesar or Britney will ever understand how much that meant, what they did.

Cards like a Boss

7-26-2013

            You have not seen someone play cards if you have not seen Bucky and Dylan play cards. You have not played cards if you have not played cards like Bucky and Dylan. If you have seen them play cards, you will understand what I experienced today, and if you have not, you should.
            It was a rainy day and no one came to swim at that small neighborhood pool, so Bucky and I, the two lifeguards, sat inside the club house and chilled for the day. When Bucky’s older brother, a lifeguard manager, was done at the water park he was working at, Phillip’s Park, he came over with Bucky’s girlfriend Haley. They brought Taco Bell…. and a deck of cards.
            After Haley left, I participated in one game of Egyptian Rat Screw with Bucky and Dylan, but little did I know of their skill. I went through my cards, but ended up being lucky because I had all the Jacks. I did eventually loose my cards in the end.
When Dylan left to use the bathroom, he gave me his stack of cards, thinking I would run out and loose against Bucky. Little did I know that I was again lucky because I had some strong cards in there. I held out until Dylan got back, but I had by then shrunk his stack to a small size. He was surprised that I had held out, but not too happy that I had shrunk his stack. He wanted me to just loose so he could start a new game.
He took his cards back from me and continued the game as I watched. It was hard and mind boggling to watch Bucky and Dylan slam their hands on that table, every few cards as it seemed. Dylan came around and started to gain his cards back from Bucky that I had lost. It was obvious that Dylan was a better player than Bucky, but not by much. They were both a pretty fare match.
Together, they bent over that table with me watching intently from the side, the card stack in the middle, all their minds and will focused on what was rapidly laying itself out before them. Their reflexes were lightning speed. Cards went down, and suddenly hands shot out from nowhere with a bang on the table. Whoever lost the slap would sometimes let out a curse under their breath. They played cards like their life depended upon it.
I was surprised how entertaining it was. I watched closely because I wanted to get good at seeing those doubles and sandwiches instantly. These guys made me suddenly interested in card playing. They made me want to get good at it. I wondered if I would ever get to watch them play cards again.
And then Dylan would goof up and blame it on me for loosing all his cards. Ah! Well he DID entrust me with his stack of cards. His excuse was he thought I’d loose them all, but I was too clever and lucky for that. I mean, I did win two slaps against Bucky which Dylan congratulated me for with a huge “TWO WHOLE SLAPS?!” sarcastically.
Don’t get me wrong, I knew they did not intend anything mean, and I took nothing personally. I just thought they were both pretty funny guys and I was seeing a side to them I had never seen before.
I watched them play game after game, and then they played Speed, which they called Spit because they played it at about five times its normal pace. This one involved them flipping lots of cards in rows and throwing them into two different piles faster than I could blink. When they were finally done, we went to clean up the pool and put away the equipment to end our day.

Sometimes brothers act differently or share interests outside of public. This is obviously Dylan and Bucky’s brother side. To those two guys, cards is not an old lady game, it is competition and pure joy.