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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1120 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 27, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Summer pool season started a few weeks ago. I'm on the board for the local pool. It is probably one of my most time consuming volunteer activities.

On the upside the board is mostly fun people who have real lives, so the meetings are often productive with a minimal amount of political jockeying. We drink at board meetings, and one of the guys on the board runs a local wine shop and does a yearly wine and dine event for board members.

On the downside the type of people that join the board are still generally busybodies. The treasurer is very opinionated on people following the rules and has a strong desire to punish rule breakers. She had a very Political-Managerial-Class idea of how to enforce rules though. Her latest idea was a strongly worded email to all the members with enumerated punishments for not following particular rules. I had to point out that the people breaking rules were probably least likely to read any such email, and that we already had the authority to punish them we didn't need to warn them first.

I would generally suggest people get involved with their local community. There will absolutely be people that disagree with politically. But if you are serving a common cause then that political difference gets papered over as irrelevant more than you'd think. And it's a good way to have things bent in a direction you'd prefer.

I will maybe share more board stories in the future. Some stories might be heavily more culture war oriented, like the little trans kid on the swim team, or the twelve year old that pulled a knife out on another kid in the park across from the pool. These stories are kind of uninteresting in the way that we are generally trying to optimize for non-controversy. None of us want to be in a media segment about trans kids on a local swim team.

The actual controversial stuff that people argue over during the board meetings are financial things. Money is tight, and it's hard to know how to beat spend it to maintain a good experience for the pool members.

So how DO you punish rulebreakers?

And more to the point, if the rulebreakers just ignore the punishment what's the ultimately sanction/enforcement mechanism?

We ban them from the pool. Short term bans at first and escalate to full membership removal. There have also been some party rentals that haven't cleaned up at all, cleaning fee for them.

By comparison to this forum I feel like there are way more options for punishment.

So what happens if someone shows up at the pool after a ban?

I'm just curious if there's a big burly guy that prevents these people from coming in, or you just call the cops and trespass them like most establishments.

Or maybe I'm envisioning this wrong and even the troublemakers are wiling to abide by punishment decisions, which doesn't explain why they break the rules so much in the first place.

Hasn't come up yet honestly. It would definitely be the call the cops option. Where we live they'd show up and actually deal with the problem and probably get a round of applause.

Troublemakers are most often teenagers being teenagers. Though recently it was an inebriated adult causing problems. Which pisses me off way more because now the pool will probably start cracking down on any kind of drinking at the pool, and thus ruining it for all the adults that can have a few beers on the sly and not become complete animals.

There is a checkin area so we will generally know if someone is trying to enter when they shouldn't, but yeah in the past people have apparently tried to dodge their punishments. Memberships at the pool are acquired as a family unit, so we can kinda get family's to punish bad teens by threatening to remove the entire family unit if a particular teen does not behave. If they are incapable of controlling their teen ... Well we have a wait-list for membership so they will be replaced by a better behaved family.

Yeah, I'm sort of gesturing at the absurdity that comes with these busybodies trying to enforce rules heavily, when the only way they can really make punishments stick is to literally have the cops show up and arrest them.

That is, if the troublemaker doesn't abide by the busybody's authoritah.

And getting arrested because you wouldn't stop running in the pool area or did too much horseplay is just a bit absurd.

Getting arrested for trespassing seems normal, and that would ultimately be the charge.

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