Pay can be inconsistent among guards, employees with the same amount of experience will get paid different amounts.
You are the only guard at many pools and are guarding for 8-10 hours strait. You are supposed to get 30 min break every 5 hours but it is very hard to kick paying members out of the pool for seemingly no reason. patrons often will either complain to manager or simply refuse to get out. Pools can be really sketchy and sometimes dangerous, I worked at an apartment complex (by myself from 9 am to 8 pm) where someone was robbed at gunpoint in their house. Many pools are neglected; they don't have enough chemicals or are missing a backboard or just filthy and even if conditions are not safe for swimming, the company tells guards to keep letting patrons in the water. Often it takes several days at least for supervisors to deal with the issue.
Supervisors will call you on your days off and ask you to work. This happens often as many guards either quit or refuse to show up for a shift. I got these calls either the night before the shift they wanted me to work, or the day of. They try to make you feel bad for not accepting it. Also the pools they want you to work at can be very far away I (mistakenly) accepted a shift for a pool I had never heard of which turned out to be 1 1/2 hours from where I live (keep in mind I don't own a car ). Some pools have passes and some have guest fees and some have vacuums that work differently than others but the company never tells you any of this before you arrive so you never know what to do at a new pool. Keys to the pool are in lock boxes and I always have to call at a new pool for the combination because they never tell me it.
Patrons often complain to you about problems out of your control but you are the person at the pool so that's who they yell at. Often these patrons were very rude and disrespectful to me.
