Spirit Of The Pool Versus Letter Of The Pool

Hang onto your hats folks, this is a long one. So Catherine had a Birthday party to attend Friday in the late afternoon, so while Ginger took Catherine to that, Quinn and I tried to go to the pool. Here's the thing though, they've recently changed the rules for entry into the pool for our neighborhood. You need these pool pass cards now. The problem was Ginger had them and she was up in Reston at the Nature Center for the party. So when we got the gate, I tried to explain the problem, showed them my driver's license which clearly has my address which is in the community, and they still wouldn't let me in. They did offer to let me pay to get in and then later I could get reimbursed for my receipt, the problem being since I never carry cash I only had $1 on me.

So they turned us away and Quinn started crying his head off (which I actually thought might sway the guy at the desk, but no, apparently he was a completely unfeeling pool Nazi simply following orders and didn't care if he made a small child cry). I went home scrounging for money and couldn't locate any there either. I suppose I could have broken into the kids piggy banks, but I didn't think of that until just now as I'm writing this out (d'oh). So I ended up calling the president of the Recreation Association for our neighborhood to explain what was going on and see if there was any type of compromise. I even tried something that's a novel approach for me, during the conversation I was nice and polite. Once I had explained the situation she didn't give me any options and then started being overly defensive about how she was having dinner with her family and didn't have time to deal with this. Despite what all my instincts said to do, I kept on being nice and polite and explained that I was sorry to bother her during dinner, but I just need some type of option here since I had a crying child that really wanted to go the pool. What I didn't do, even though I wanted to, was explain that by holding the position of president of the recreation association she may at times have to deal with things even when it wasn't convenient for her. She eventually calmed down a bit and even offered to have the pool manager Phil call her if I couldn't get in. I still wanted to try and obey the rules though, so I called Ginger to find out if there was any money in the house and she pointed to me where we have some emergency money at the house. Which was a 100 dollar bill.

So armed with that we went back and tried to get in again. Even though I mentioned I had talked to the recreation association president and she said it would be okay, they still wouldn't let me in and next thing you know I'm talking with Phil. The only option I was being given was to pay the guest fee, but they couldn't break the $100. Since they had pointed out that I could get reimbursed for the guest fee later, I offered to pay $50 a person to get in and I would just come back by later and get it once I had possession of the pool passes again. They wouldn't do that either though because they didn't want to be responsible for handling that much money. So once I asked Phil what our possible options were at this point, he finally conceded to let me in without paying the guest fee, but he gave me the 'ultimatum' that he "was going to need to see the pool passes or get the guest fee by the end of the night." Deal! (I didn't bother mentioning that had this been presented as an option earlier we all would be in a better mood at this point).


I called Ginger and told her the situation, and she said that she would bring the passes by on the way home from the party. Although once they eventually did show up Catherine decided to wander around the in baby pool in her dress by holding the dress up above the water, which worked fine until she tripped and got completely soaked. We all ended up sticking around for fifteen minutes more at that point.

So here's the the part that I really don't understand. I asked Phil why that we as residential individuals had to carry around this card to let us in, and why couldn't the cards simply be kept at the pool and the staff could look through for the passes when people showed up. He explained they couldn't be responsible for keeping passes for everyone in the neighborhood (even though last year they had a book with everyone's photo in it). But apparently the whole point of the pool passes was the association thought too many people that didn't live in the neighborhood were entering without paying the guest fee. This would be directly related to negligence of the pool staff checking the book as people came in. And yet, they didn't want to be responsible for handling the $100 because (and I found this out from Ginger later) they had some issues last year with money being taken from the till. Seems to me that the people in the neighborhood are being burdened with all this crap because of the lack of accountability and responsibility of the members of the pool staff (and yes, I know most of them are just teenagers, but come on). Even better, we're doing this new method to insure guests pay a fee that they apparently believe the staff is just going take. What the heck? I just don't understand why they have this hard and fast rule that only sticks to the letter of the rule and not the spirit of it. I mean it was obvious when I offered to pay $50 a person that I wasn't trying to sneak into the pool without paying. I'm not sure who I should be upset with at this point, the recreation association for the stupid rule, the staff at the pool for following the letter of the laws instead of the spirit, or whether I should just be upset with the general state of things in the nation as a whole that actually lead to there being a need for this type of crap. At least the pool was fun once we got there.