Uninvited Guests

We are fortunate to live in a fairly upscale neighborhood. There are no through streets so we have very little traffic, and our condo property has its own loop road that passes in front of all four buildings and the pool area.

We had a little trouble with some vandalism last summer in the pool deck area and, being the insomniac that I am, I got into the habit of taking a swim each night sometime around midnight. I caught the same carload of visitors whooping it up several nights in a row and the County Police department put the fear of God into them and things settled down nicely.

I’m not a militant pool police snob because I’ve crashed my fair share of swimming pools through the years. After I moved out of apartments and bought my first house back in 1985, the first thing we did was find a nearby apartment complex and started using the pool.

The most important thing about pool crashing is to not call attention to yourself by acting like some kind of ape-shit Tarzan idiot, don’t break things owned by other people, and don’t attempt to handle things like pool toys or the wives/girlfriends of the other pool guests that might actually belong there.

It also helps if you find a vacant apartment or condo and learn the number so if someone questions you about your residency status you can not look like a total moron. Saying you live in building 4 when the units are numbered A through D can cause problems if you are unfortunate enough to meet the local “Pool Nazi.”

The restrooms at our pool house were locked and out of service last spring when we arrived here. After some lobbying and campaigning efforts last winter, I managed to talk the Condo board into having the restrooms cleaned and the locks replaced (they had lost the keys to the doors) and I am now the only resident that has my own key to the restrooms. It’s an awesome responsibility—I hope that I’m up to the challenge.

You now have three choices: pee in the pool, walk dripping wet to your own condo to pee, or honor and obey ME—I am the keeper of the key!

Any, way…we’ve been using the pool for several days in a row this week and we got lazy and left the bathrooms unlocked and our pool toys and floats in the pool house. Yesterday Pat and the girls went to the pool while I did some shopping and hung out in the condo enjoying the silence and solitude for a few hours.

When I went down to the pool to check on everyone I learned that we had had some pool crashers that chose to enjoy our toys, and they split one of our expensive foam rafts in half—how we’ll never know because the thing was strong enough to support my massive girth. The suspects were still at the pool when our party arrived, and when casually questioned about their residency they gave us the old “we have friends that live out here” as an answer.

Why do people have to act like retards when they are uninvited guests?