The Jackass

When I was about 38 weeks pregnant last June, I went to the Y for an evening swim. Apparently everyone else had the same idea and it was pretty crowded. I was really annoyed because this guy had taken a stool and placed it at the end of the lane (on deck) and was sitting on it with his legs sprawled out so that no one could enter the lane without asking him to move. He was coaching his son. The lifeguard ended up coming over and pointed out to him that 1)It was not a private lane 2) It was adult lap swim (apparently the legal age in MA is 12 since the son wasn't asked to leave). He was pretty annoyed and even said that I was inconveniencing him and that his son was a competitive swimmer, but he moved his stool so that I could get in the pool.

This evening I went to the Y to swim and was pretty surprised when I walked out on deck and saw someone sitting on a stool parked right at the end of the lane. Yes, it was the same jackass! Luckily there were a couple of open lanes so I didn't need to share a lane with his son. However, when I was using a kickboard I happened to look over and see the man hovering over his son's lane with a kickboard out in front of him. His son was at the other end of the pool. Let me just take a moment and say that I was a competitive swimmer in junior high, high school and college and whenever a coach need to get our attention when we were swimming, he/she would throw a pull-buoy in front of us as we swam (no, not at us.) Anyhow, this guy waited until his son swam back to the his end of the pool and his butt broke the water during a flip turn. This jackass dropped the kickboard smack on his son's butt. The son stopped swimming and came up sputtering. The man made some sort of motion that it was time to go. (In addition to all this weirdness, you don't normally stop a competitive swimmer mid workout and say that it's time to go).

After I finished swimming I went into the hot tub for a few minutes. Since there was no one else in the pool the lifeguard came over to chat with me. She mentioned that before I arrived, the man kept on yelling at his son to swim faster and faster and the boy ended up bursting in tears. I knew that the man was a jackass! She also mentioned that about an hour before he had gotten there someone had thrown up in the swimming pool. Everyone had to evacuate. Apparently there were 75 people in the pool when it happened. Mass panic broke out as everyone was convinced that they had contracted a terrible virus. The manager had to come in and calm everyone down. Too bad the jackass hadn't come earlier. Talk about being inconvenienced.