by finolino » Sun May 24, 2015 12:02 am
angry wall of text incoming
so, the tests to determine my ranking as a prospective lifeguard were today. the better you do on the test, the higher position you get, and the less chance there is you'll get stuck working in some pool on the opposite side of the city for the rest of the summer. beaches, which i prefer over pools, require higher rankings to work at.
long story short, i aced most of it. showed up every day prior on time, did all i was supposed to, had one of the fastest swim times and got a 100 on all of my written tests. the practical test, which i got an a on last year, involves using your knowledge in real world situations, and also happens to bear the most weight on the final ranking you get. that test was a wholly different story, though.
for the practical, you basically get paired with a partner at random and matched with an instructor, who then gives you and your partner a set of real life scenarios to see if you both know what to do. things like one and two person cpr, conscious and unconscious choking, oxygen, and treating conscious victims all play a part here.
i started the test out just fine. things were running smoothly and, although my partner had a few slip ups, i helped him out and we quickly moved on. we were both confident and i was ready to give a practical that rivaled last year's.
by the time the test was halfway done, though, my confidence had completely drained. this instructor, who happened to have the smuggest of faces on, obviously didn't care enough to help either of us out (dude just sat there cleaning his new foamposites while paying little attention to what we were doing), and so by that point i was so nervous that i couldn't think properly. of course, it didn't help that he would always laugh at our mistakes, make mean/annoying jokes about us (yes, i can hear you calling me a crip because i'm wearing a blue shirt. yes, i heard you call me a crip the other eight times) and, whenever he told us something, word it in a way as malicious towards us as possible just to make us feel even worse. i would look around at the other more supportive and optimistic instructors and think "why couldn't i have them," and i know my partner was thinking the same things i was. when we were doing two person cpr, i looked over at him, observed him visibly shaking, with beads of sweat running down his forehead and onto the mannequin we were vigorously trying to save. at the end of the test, after we had stuttered out a few final answers to his smugly worded questions, our instructor basically told us to fuck off and said that we should (ironically) be ashamed of ourselves.
the lowest possible grade you can get whilst still passing is a c-.
you know what my partner and i were left with? two c-'s and two giant puddles of sweat for the janitors to clean up. we were both set on working at beaches (which, of course, that prick of an instructor laughed at when we made the mistake of telling that to him), but now i'm probably going to end up at some shitty pool far out of my way as a result.
i'm not perfect at what i do. heck, i wouldn't even have gotten an a with my initial performance (b+ at best). but getting the lowest possible score from an "instructor" who showed me zero respect after i'd worked for two years to try my best to get the skills required to be the best worker i can be down is downright insulting.
after the test, i went home and stared blankly at a tv screen trying to cheer myself up but i just can't and now i'm writing this. i want to send an email to someone in charge to let them know how disrespected and wronged i feel, but i know that, even though one of the park district's biggest rules is that all lifeguards must be treated equally and be equally respectful and supportive of each other, they'll just think i'm a hothead who can't accept his failures. what do?