Things to love about going to the pool
- Perfect cool-down on a hot day
- The kids have fun splashing around
- Inexpensive and close to home
- Secure belongings in a locker; don’t have to hide keys in shoes
- The cool wave pool… just like the beach, only cleaner (no jellyfish, for a start)
Things to hate about going to the pool
- Hot day = crowded
- Little kids splashing you accidentally
- Wrinkly skin and chlorine in your eyes
- Have to take the car to get there… no parks in the shade
- $3 for a lousy cup of chips… and I found I only had $2.80 in cash with me
4 replies on “The pool”
Funny you should mention secure lockers.
My credit card was stolen (first time in 25 years) from Kew Rec swimming pool lockers.
I was dumb enough to only have a 4 digit PIN on my card (I since found out you can use upto 6 digits, if you wish) and to use that PIN for the locker code.
Next day I found $4,000 gone from my account – 2K of it while I was still in the pool.
Apparently, the perp hangs out in the changing roms, pretending to be getting dried and shoulder surfs PINs from people entering lockers. They them open up while you are in the pool – carefully only remove the card, so you hopefully don’t notice anything wrong and lock up again. Then they try the same PIN on the card at the local ATM.
So I guess it’s a common thing for folks to do as I did and use the same pin for both. The police and the bank manager had both heard of the scam before.
Maybe they prey on parents (like me) who are busy with young kids.
Anyway – be aware next time you use PIN secured lockers in public places. :-)
Ooh, nasty. Well I don’t use my card PIN for anything else, including lockers. And at the pool we usually go to, it’s not that easy for others to watch what PIN you enter.
Our drinking water now smells just like the public pools did when I was a child. We were scared to swim in water that smelled too strongly of chlorine in case we bleached our hair/clothes/eyes; now we guzzle it down, hoping it’s not doing the same to our insides.
I inherited a water filter in my ‘new’ house. Didn’t use it for a year. I’d lived in Asia on bottled water for 15 years and I figured tap water in Melbourne would be a good idea.
We do have world class water catchments apparently. At least when they are not being clearfelled for profit, but that’s another story . . .
One day I opened up the old filter and found brown gunk in there. So I thought I should maybe try replacing the filters and use it for a while.
There is a shop in Camberwell that sells all the bits and their demo surprised me – showing how much stuff was in the water. (OK – so it was in their interest to do so, but it was a simple test using a white bowl and your eyes, no gimmicks and they were genuinely nice folks doing this for 15 years).
One filter removed the chlorine and boy it tastes so much better that we drink more water now. We even fill our own bottles and take with us on trips to reduce buying bottled water.
It’s worth considering.