I’ve told you all that I have had a lot of jobs, including working as a lifeguard, and how I was fired from being a lifeguard. As interesting as that story is, the story on how I became a lifeguard is even better.
I had just divorced from my first wife a year or more earlier. I think this was in the winter or spring of 2000. I was living in my car and homeless until just a couple of months earlier. To make ends meet and get off the street, in addition to my main job working for the Fire Department, I also worked for a company that did medical standbys for sporting events. As a certified rescue diver and public safety diver, I did things like rescue swimmer for offshore powerboat racing, things like that. It was infrequent, some times only working one or two days a month. Hey, you do what you have to do to not be homeless.
I still needed money because child support was leaving me without enough money to survive, so I had also taken a third job at Sea World as a janitor. Our job was to clean Shamu stadium between shows. We also had to send people to clean up after the Clydesdales when they paraded through in the afternoon dropping road apples all over the place, and we had to send two people to this floating platform in the middle of the pond that was in the center of the park.
Those two people had to hand out life preservers and help people use the Flamingo shaped paddleboats that were in that pond. One day, I was working on that platform with a 17 year old when one of the tourists fell in the water. His wife began screaming how the man couldn’t swim. I told my coworker to call it in, and I jumped in the water after the guy. When health services arrived, the paramedic was a coworker from the fire department who was also working there on his days off, and found me treading water with the tourist in tow, and he helped me pull the guy from the water.
A few days later, I was in the Sea World offices to pick up my paycheck. I stopped by on my way home from one of my other jobs, so I was wearing a uniform shirt with EMT, Rescue Diver, and Rescue Swimmer patches on it. The manager pulled me into his office and told me he would be writing me up for unauthorized swimming in the lake.
I replied, “But I wasn’t just swimming. I was rescuing a drowning guest.”
Manager: “That doesn’t matter. You aren’t trained to rescue people.”
Me: <looked down at uniform, then back at manager>
Manager: “You aren’t trained by Sea World.”
Me: “So what was I supposed to do, watch the guy drown?”
Manager: “No, you call for health services or run to one of the exhibits and get an animal trainer.”
Me: “Health services is not allowed in the water. The trainers can’t leave Shamu stadium because they have to watch the whales. The whale ate that guy’s dick, remember?”
Manager: “Either way, you shouldn’t have gone in the water.”
So he wrote me up, and I disputed it with the employee relations committee, or whatever they called it. The committee suggested as a compromise that I be sent to be a lifeguard over at the new water park they were opening across the street, Discovery Cove, pending me passing the swim test. When the manager told me my transfer was approved, I said “I thought I wasn’t trained to do rescues?” His reply was: “Don’t push it.”
That’s how I wound up as a lifeguard.
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