Weird Stuff

I’ve Seen Some Weird Stuff!

No matter what you do for a living, if you stay at it long enough, you’ll see some strange things. Over my years in the swimming pool business, I’ve been amazed at times with things that pool owners have done. And I’m not talking in a good way. I’m talking about blunders, goofs, and downright what-were-they-thinking moments. I won’t mention any names to protect the not-so-innocent.

Gone fishin’.

Like many others, I enjoy fishing and occasionally return home with a catch. In one instance, we had a customer do just that. However, what he did next was…unusual, to say the least. I guess he didn’t want to kill his gilled friends, so he set them free. In the family above ground pool. The family would jump in and join them. To paraphrase and tweak a line from the classic movie, The Godfather. ‘He swims with the fishes.

Unfortunately, chlorine and no natural food habitat did them in. Like a frog, a couple fish croaked. The intrepid angler tried fishing them out but ultimately jumped in and netted them. But not before snagging the liner with the barbed hook and ripping the liner in a couple places as he yanked it free. He picked up a couple patch kits from us, but I don’t remember seeing him after that.

“Do You Believe in Miracles!”

Al Michael’s countdown of the last few seconds of the 1980 U.S. Olympic Team’s upset of the Soviet team is etched in sports incredulity. It was an amazing upset…possibly the greatest in sports history. It also spurred some young wannabe hockey stars to do an amazingly unwise thing. With his parents’ full approval.

I was visiting my brother (also in the pool business) in New Jersey in the winter of 1982. He received a call from a desperate pool owner. His liner needed replaced…immediately. As the rectangular Kayak-style pool was frozen, there was no way to install a liner. In the subfreezing temperature there was simply nothing to be done except wait for the ice age to end. But we took a ride to examine the problem. It was a doozie.

The pool owner had agreed not to cover the pool for the winter so the kids could skate on it when the water froze. But they were smart, or so they thought. They outlawed wearing skates and said only tennis shoes were allowed. And so, their son invited several sneaker-wearing friends for the next Miracle on Ice. The fun resulted in disaster. As the kids slid their way across the frozen surface, they frequently skidded to violent stops, slamming into the walls. More precisely, the liner over the walls. Vinyl gets very brittle, and the rough contact ripped the exposed liner above the ice line in at least a dozen places. The only miracle was that the pool frame wasn’t destroyed, too.

My brother installed a new liner the following spring.

Bouncing along, not so merrily.

Backyards can be a lot of fun, with swing sets, trampolines, and of course, swimming pools. But linking all three together into an adventure can be a bad idea. And dangerous. Anyway, here’s one for the ages. A customer used all three to create havoc and a visit to the ER.

The swing set was pretty far from the above-ground pool but that didn’t stop one adventurous teenager from trying to reach the pool from the high-flying swing. Releasing from the seat at the apex as high as he could get, the distance was just too great. The young would-be daredevil repeatedly landed about five feet short of the pool. Then he had a brainstorm. He moved the family mini trampoline to the point where he had continually landed. Then, he got back on the swing, achieved maximum height, and jumped from his seat. He landed directly on the trampoline, bouncing high in the air…and came down on a top rail instead of in the water. The rail buckled and that probably saved him from serious injury as it absorbed some of the rough landing. The parents took him to the ER to make sure he was okay and then stopped at the store to get a replacement rail. Word was the kid was paying for it. There was no discussion on the health of the trampoline.

Don’t blame the dog!

I moved indoors to the comfort of an air-conditioned showroom, having given up installing a few years prior before trying my hand at private investigation. In the interim, a new above-ground size had become popular. It was 33-feeet in diameter, and I’ve been on smaller oceans than that. Okay…maybe I exaggerate, but it is truly enormous. We sold one not far away, so during the installation process, I took a short trip to see it in person. I talked briefly with the homeowner who had a black labrador. I’ll call him Duke and he stayed by his master’s side the entire visit. Great dog, beautiful and friendly.

It took several days for the pool to fill, considering it held more than 27,000-gallons. However, within a week he was back in the store and sheepishly asked how much a new liner would run. He explained that he had built a small deck for the pool and that the labrador had climbed up the steps and jumped into the water. Wow! A lab that likes water. Shocking. Anyway, the dog couldn’t climb out…but tried repeatedly. He clawed at the liner and frame, trying to get back to the deck. In the process, Duke shredded the liner but did manage to extricate himself about the time the pool owner came to his rescue.

We sold him a new liner at a greatly reduced cost and installed it the same week. The customer also replaced the standard deck ladder with resin walk-in steps to accommodate the family, which of course included Duke.

Locked and loaded!

Here’s a rule of thumb: if you’re going to do any target shooting in your back yard, don’t have a pool behind the target. Especially one full of people. This happened about forty years ago and went like this:

Like lots of people, the pool owner liked to target shoot. He built a straw and plywood backdrop for his target and affixed it. The family above-ground pool was about 30 feet away, behind the protective target wall. Two issues. One, it wasn’t big enough and was susceptible to an errant shot when combined with two, a novice shooter that was lucky just to have the gun pointed in the right general direction. Anyway, the man who produced this rocket-science plan shot for a while, then encouraged his wife to give it a go. I have known many women who can shoot rings around their husbands like they were Annie Oakley, but this lady was not one of them. According to his story, he showed her how to hold the gun and how to aim. She came up short on the aiming part. She missed the target but hit the pool. Not once, but twice. And then for good measure, a third time. Naturally, the liner was ruined too and the gentleman sheepishly joked that it looked like the pool was taking a leak. Which of course it was, although that’s not exactly what he was alluding to.

The good news: nobody was in the pool. The saddest part of this bungled escapade was they lived in the country with a big yard and a few hundred acres around them. The target practice could have been safely done in a myriad of locations on the property. Ultimately, we installed a new wall and liner and kept the wall that succumbed at the Shootout at the O.K. Corral. We called it our ‘Gunshot Special’ and eventually sold it to someone that needed wall material for repairs.

More to come, one of these days.

There are many more stories like these I can relate, but those are for another day. Perhaps I’ll explain how a dirt bike nearly totaled a pool and how a car did. Or the guy building his own above-ground pool who wanted it deeper, so he jacked it up. Or the pool we had to carry through a house because the houses on the street were so close you couldn’t walk between them. Or the bulldog that disapproved of our install so much he knocked the pool down. Or…ah, you get the picture.