The 5th of December 2011 was my first day in the leisure industry. It was a Monday. I know it was a Monday because I scrolled back through the calendar on my laptop to find out, and I know it was the 5th because most new jobs make you start on a Monday and the 5th of December 2012 was my second start date with the same company after having left and returned. My university course, Sport and Recreation Management, was designed to get those foolish enough to choose it into roles within the leisure, sport or hospitality industry. While at Uni I also did my NPLQ (National Pool Lifeguard Qualification). So, this may be viewed as a success, that I would finally be using my degree and NPLQ. It quickly became abundant that this may not be the case. While having a degree may be beneficial in the long run of life, it was far from necessary in that environment. While management was in the title, I had no experience managing anyone in a work environment and in that industry. I started as a lifeguard and in a public centre (rather than a private club) I was pretty much a glorified cleaner but got paid less than the actual cleaners.
All new starters in a lifeguard role at some point were made to watch a video call the “Life Changing Event”. This was a mock interrogation by the police on a lifeguard who had got distracted while on poolside and in that brief moment someone had drowned. The purpose of the video is to scare the lifeguards and make them aware that corporate manslaughter is always looming over their head should they lose concentration, start to day dream or talk to another member of staff or customer for too long. Every lifeguard in every pool ever, has day dreamed, talked to another lifeguard for longer than they should when swapping round or talked to John the early morning regular about his current sudoku challenge while everyone else is swimming on behind you. And it is easily done. Lifeguarding is boring. You sit up on that chair for hours throughout the day, watching other, mostly old, people swim. Occasionally you get treated to someone young and good looking (in a bikini if you are very lucky) but they are few and far between and tend to be in the gym. I tried to keep myself entertained by playing Connect 4 with the floating heads. The only rule was they could not be in a straight line in the same lane. I didn’t win anything other than self-satisfaction and a mental fist pump of success but it made me concentrate on the swimmers.
In the event that someone did decide to drown in the pool, have a heart attack or any other health related dilemma, you are generally trained quite well. To keep working as a lifeguard you are required to attended a minimum of two hours lifeguard training every month. This is usually one hour of dry side first aid and then an hour in the pool practicing rescues and tows. While I am quietly confident in my ability to rescue someone and perform CPR in my sleep, there were some members of staff I would have been concerned about if they had to deal with serious medical situations for real. Some of my colleagues have had to deal with strokes in the car park, seizers in the pool and heart attacks just by the front desk. The only serious incident I had to deal with was an 85-year-old with dementia in the pool who let go of his swimming aid and was unable to keep his head above the water by himself. He was hanging on to the side so it was just a case of running around the pool and picking him up and escorting him to his wife in the shallow end. I hardly got wet. Some people will be glad if that is all they had to deal with. I’m aware it is quite dark and I was not wishing ill on anyone but after nearly seven years of having first aid training every month, I would liked to have tested my ability and seen how I could cope in a more severe situation. It’s like the film Jarhead where Jake Gyllenhaal spent ages training to be a sniper and then not actually getting to use the skill he was taught. While I’m confident in my skills and knowledge to deal with the situation, I’m a big softy and probably would have cried my eyes out for hours afterwards because oh how traumatic it would have probably been. PTSD is no joke.
When I was initially offered the job, I was also offered another one to be a water sports instructor in Greece for seven months the following summer. Five months later I went off to work in the fun side of the hospitality industry. While I was out there, I was getting messages from my duty manager back at the leisure centre asking when I would be back and would I be interested in returning. I could be a duty manager myself if I did! I took this this is a compliment that they wanted me back, so after my return to the UK I meet the new boss and I signed back up and started on the 5th of December again. Now, during this meeting with the new boss, I was told that there was no DM (duty manager) position at that point but I would be one in the new year. I was ok with this as it gave me a chance to remember how to do the LG (lifeguard) role again, which didn’t take long to be honest. New year came and went and still no DM role was offered to me, which made sense as it was fully staffed. Seven months later and having turned down an assistant beach manager role back in Greece, I was still a lifeguard with only the odd DM shift if one was ill or on holiday. I was got offered a role as an assistant house master in a boarding school which I accepted and did for a year and at the end of it I went back out to Greece as a beach manager for another water sports company. Sadly, that was cut short due to injury and I went back home. I ended up back in the leisure centre on a casual basis (more commonly known as a zero-hour contract), which had been taken over, rebranded and got another general manager in my absence. Being back at the leisure centre was not the dream but I appreciated them having me again. I also signed up a teaching agency as I found a passion for it during my time at the boarding school. The teaching paid more but you could never guarantee the standard of the school they would send you to and they would call me up in the morning around 8am and ask if I could make it to a school an hour away by half past.
I juggled these two jobs, occasionally doing long term placements in schools where I wouldn’t lifeguard for weeks at a time until I was offered a secondment DM position at the leisure centre. It was only part time but it would look good on the CV so I took it. This prevented me from doing any long-term placements in schools and with a four-week rolling rota, the agency struggles to know when I was free or not but I got to learn more about the industry and try my hand at more complex aspects of running and maintaining a centre. Just over a year later, my fourth general manager decided to let me know my secondment role came to an end on the day and from that point onwards I was back to being a casual LG. Had I been renting a place rather than living with the parents this could have been rather troublesome. Luckily the leisure industry seldom pays anyone enough to cut that umbilical cord, even if you are a few rungs up the ladder. With another general manager in my bad books again I returned to doing as much cover teaching as possible. The special educational needs team eventually stole me from main stream schools and I started doing long term placements in bad behaviour schools. The initial reason behind the cover teaching was to gain enough teaching experience to compensate for my low class of degree and eventually get on to a teacher training course. This never happened and I got a little tired of agency work so I packed it in. Other than a four-week gap to lead an expedition in 2017 I returned to the world of leisure as a casual DM doing full time hours.
It didn’t take long after my return to remember everything I hated about the centre. Work shy lifeguards, spineless managers, double standards around every corner, pointless box ticking exercises and customers who claim to have have been going to that centre long before I was born and therefore will entitle them to be twats. It was an endless battle and there was always a fire to fight. Metaphorically speaking of course until some bright spark put a still hot portable BBQ in a packed wheelie bin. Most of these shouldn’t have ever existed. I was tired of feeling like I was the only one who cared and having to be the bad cop when other staff members (including managers) couldn’t even meet basic standards. That is not my default setting. It got to the point where I turned the cleaning cupboard into a rage room with a personal stash of old squeegee handles and being caught on CCTV putting my foot through a filing cabinet, destroying many innocent inanimate objects and slicing my thumb open during these outbursts, the penny finally dropped that the centre was an unhealthy place to be. Mentally and physically. A change of scenery was in order.
I moved to a bigger centre in the same company which offered more opportunities. I took a half step down the ladder but because it was classed as a London region I got paid more. Things started off well but it didn’t take long for familiar cracks to show. It turned out the problems of the previous centre weren’t exclusively theirs. The honeymoon period was short lived and staff were leaving in droves. I got promoted again but there was no one to manage and standards dropped massively. What annoyed me about this was just how easily everyone accepted this rather than trying to resolve or compensate for it. Many people had openly given up resulting in other who saw this follow suit. I didn’t have any squeegee handles and had removed the innocent inanimate objects.
The main issue was that the contract for the building was out for tender so the powers that be had clearly made a decision not to fill the many spaces that had become available, hoping that the rest of us would just bite the bullet and work harder to compensate for the staff shortage. I can think of no other logical reason to take six months to advertise for a general manager and duty managers after the previous ones had left. The company also wouldn’t spend money on fixing anything broken, because if they lost the contract the new company would have a working building to walk into and if they won it back, they were just going to knock it down anyway. An easy decision to make when you aren’t the one having to face the angry mob and explaining why there is no available heating for the yoga class at the far side of the building during the winter. One of the few perks of the job was having 6.2 weeks annual leave, but on many occasions, I had it rejected because there was no one to cover. Certain people still managed to get theirs by having everyone else jump through hoops to achieve what was apparently impossible when I wanted a holiday. I ended up reducing myself back to a casual contract just so I could.
It was no secret that I wanted to get out of the leisure industry during the last two years in it. I had no love for it and I had done my time for whatever crimes I committed in a previous life to find myself there. Over the years I spend loads of time on job search websites, depressed that I was not qualified or experienced enough to do anything else but work in leisure. Some people love it and there are many different pathways you can travel depending on your interests. Sadly, none of them were for me.
It has been just shy of a month since I managed to walk free and this time it is for keeps, not just on bail. I have landed myself a job not to far from the dream, in the operations department for the company I lead an expedition for a few years ago. I have taken a pay drop but I am on a path that I want to walk, which surely is more important. I will be the first person to point out everything that is wrong with the leisure centres I worked in and the industry as a whole, but I also think that everyone should do it at some point. Not just to appreciate every job that comes after it but also the amount of life skills you will develop. Communication, problem solving, patience, tolerance of idiots and juggling priorities depending on who has called in sick and what vital piece of equipment has broken that day. And regardless of my job title I was at some point a lifeguard, cleaner, receptionist, class instructor, gym instructor, painter, tiler, plumber, electrician, gym equipment engineer, kids club host, sales adviser and barista. I was never taught how to do half of that but with enough trial and error I worked it all out and hopefully passed some of it on to the ones coming after me. There are some aspects of the job that I liked and people I will miss. Some people will be in leisure for the long run and I know some that will do very well out of it, but It just wasn’t for me. So, while I have resigned from leisure, I might finally get a holiday as a result.
