When I first started at my lifeguard job, my co-workers were predominantly white. The only minorities were me and another girl that went to my school. I worked at a pool so due to stereotypes it made sense that a lot of people didn’t look like me. Patrons wouldn’t take me seriously or would assume that I couldn’t swim. I think now as an adult there are times were I see the inequality in treatment but it happens a lot less.
I can think of a time where a patrons was angry about something (can’t remember what it was) and wanted to speck to a manager. The man really just wanted to talk to a man of high status. Lucky for him he had to go through the lifeguard, supervisor, swim lesson coordinator, aquatic director, assistant superintendent, and THEN our superintend to get to a man in power. Every other position was a woman. He gave up after the aquatic director. It’s times like that where it felt like it didn’t matter who you were talking to or how trained you are or how high of a status you had. If you weren’t a man at work it wasn’t good enough.
I try to get along with everyone at work either part-time or full-time. It makes the work environment less stressful to me. I think the majority of the time they get along with me too. However if I try to put my input into a new project for example or how to go about a specific situation, I get shut down pretty quickly. I’m not sure if it makes sense but it almost feels like a someone is only a boss because they get to tell you what to do instead of being a leader for your employees. I’m not sure if that makes much sense. I don’t feel heard talking to the higher ups when they need the extra input. For example, there could be something broken and can easily be fix if you tell the higher ups. Instead they’ll tell you that nothing is broken and rather than a simple $50 fix it’s now up to a $5000 fix.
