I love being the night shift campground supervisor. As summer gets closer, and school gets out around the country, more and more people are coming to Gettysburg, and to the campground.I am beginning to feel more like a resident of Gettysburg than a visitor. I can tell our guests where to find a good restaurant and give them directions how to get there. I can tell them how to get to the campground from the major highways, and I can tell them where they can go to see a movie. Jim thinks this is funny, because he thinks I am bad at giving directions, even though we have only gotten lost once in 15 years with me reading the maps.
If anyone out there wonders what it is really like to be a Night Shift Campground Supervisor, here are a few things that went on at my job over the last week:
A little girl was bitten by a dog.She was with her parents at the shuffleboard court when the owner of the dog came up. All the adults chatted for a minute about the dog, which was a very nice dog. While the adults were chatting, the child was petting the dog. All of a sudden, the dog snapped at her, resulting in a gash on her face that required 12 stitches. Now the different part is that the father was calm, cool, collected. He did not yell and scream at the owner of the dog. He told me later that things happen, he just wished that it had not happened to his little girl. I thought that was amazing, how calm he could be about the whole thing. Most people would be talking about lawyers and suing and such. He just said, “I was standing right there and could not have prevented it myself.”
The second thing that happened was that an older man came in, registered, and drove his motorhome to the site. He came back all huffy and mad as a hornet because our rock on the site had damaged his motorhome. He was demanding to speak to the manger, and guess who was the senior management person on duty? Me, the Night Shift Supervisor.So, while I was thinking to myself that HE was the one driving the thing, I asked him what I could do for him. He said he wanted to be compensated for his loss. I told him that I could not do anything like that and that he would need to speak to the owner, who was not on the property at the moment. Finally got him calmed down and out of the office. Whew!It is at times like that that I do not like being a supervisor.
Next in was a lady (and I use that term loosely) who was shopping in the store with her four year old child. I watched and listened (I was FORCED to listen as she was screaming at the child the whole time) as they walked through the store. The kid was holding two candy bars and a sucker in one hand, and a Kool-Aid drink in a plastic bottle in the other hand. He had the unopened drink in his mouth, chewing on the top of it. The mother was saying, “You need to decide it you want the candy or the drink, hurry up, make a decision, we have to go, decide!”I was thinking to myself, a four year old doesn’t even know what “decide” means! So, I said to her, “You will have to buy the drink because he has had it in his mouth already.”She looked at ME like I was crazy, and said “I KNOW THAT!”and I am thinking, then why are you making this kid think he has a choice about it?She wound buying all that sweet sugary stuff for him. Well, she is the one who has to live with the kid.
A while later, four teenage boys came in to register. They had made a reservation for two campsites next to each other, for a total of 8 people. When I told them the total due they wanted to argue about the amount, because our published rates are $175 for a week. I explained that it is $175 plus 10% tax for two people, and $8 plus 10% tax for each additional person per site. So, for a week on each site, with 4 people per site, that came to $315.70 per site for the week. The boy who had made the reservation claimed he was not told about the extra charges for the additional people, and therefore he should not have to pay it. I asked him how he found out about the campground. He said he saw the webpage on the internet. I told him our rates are published on the internet, and they state the charges for extra people and tax. They were not very happy, and even came back later and wanted a refund of a couple hundred dollars, because they did not think “it was fair for them to be charged when they did not know about it”.What? NO, I did not refund any money to them.
The next day, the four girls arrived. While one of my co-workers was checking them in, I overheard a converstion the girls were having amongst themselves:
1st girl “Why didn’t we just come up with the guys yesterday?”
2nd girl “Because Joe did’nt want me to ride up here with him.”
Excuse me, he wants you to sleep with his little teenage self in a tent for six nights, but he does not want you to ride to the campground with him in the same car? And you went for it? Where is your pride, girl? Oh, yeah, that stuff is none of my business.
So, on Monday night, all the work campers met at Linda’s site and shared some gluten-free pasta salad, some cheese, and some wine. Lots of wine. Night Shift Campground Supervisor is a great job, that requires lots of wine.
Meesh says
Sounds like a colorful bunch of campers. I KNOW that the wine helped!
I would chose wine over a kool-aid drink anyday – that is what I would DECIDE.