Years ago, I vacationed with my wife and three young daughters at a fine hotel in the mountains of New Hampshire. The place caters to the winter sports clientele and has lots of free hot chocolate and coffee. It also has both an indoor pool and a heated outdoor pool with a gigantic attached hot tub. Like most hotel pools the establishment also displayed their affinity for signage. When I counted I totalled seventy-three safety rules between the two pools.
I have long been fascinated with pool signs. I became a lifeguard just after my sixteenth birthday and worked around pools, on and off, for the next ten years. Swimming pools inside and out are festooned with signs on all of their walls. Small signs, big signs, sometimes the same sign on every wall. And when you begin to look carefully they make very little sense.
One of my favorite themes is graphic descriptions of what you can’t do with your body. On one sign, “14. Spitting, blowing of nose, urinating or defecating into the pool or onto the deck, improper public displays of affection, and profanity are PROHIBITED.”
Most of the rules take this form. Little parallel structure within the rule or from rule to rule and a low bar for what belongs together. Why don’t public displays of affection have their own rule? If they are codifying that one cannot poop into the pool or on the deck, what about the grass around the pool? Does capitalizing prohibited change much?
The other characteristic of pool rules is that they often are long. Rule 14, above, above comes from a list of thirty at the Gurney Park Pool in New York. new year’s eve at an indoor/outdoor pool complex that had 75 distinct rules. The point of all of these rules seems to be to cover everything that could possibly go wrong. But in trying to do that, lists are created that don’t hang together around any kind of central theme and often the posted rules are not the real rules. Our local pool in Concord, New Hampshire just put up brand new pool signs with fifteen rules. They include the typical fare, no diving, no open sores, shower before going into the pool, etc. But the biggest rule that lifeguards are told to enforce is no pool toys. Why didn’t they put the rule that they care most about on the new signs?
In addition to missing rules it is often the case that the posted rules aren’t the rules at all. When we went to the pool for New Year’s there were many signs about no alcohol at the pool. But the lifeguards themselves handed out red cups to those swimmers that were drinking out of cans or bottles.
