Final 2

My worst job ever took place during the summer after my freshman year of high-school. There where restrictions in place on the minimum age that a person must be before they start working, so if you were younger than sixteen, you didn't have many choices for earning money. Fortunately, through some loophole, there was one job that was able to be had by kids as young as 14. Unfortunately, this was the worst job I have ever had.

The job was to be a “swim-aid” at the local pool. The term “swim-aid” was basically just a glorified way of saying swimming teacher. So, my job was to teach little kids how to swim. To be specific, most of the kids that we were teaching were between 3 and 5. some of them where still in diapers. Some of them had never been in the water before. Some of them would start crying the second they got in the water and not stop until they were taken out. One of the worst things about the job was that the parents could care less about weather or not the kids were actually being taught to swim- they would basically treat it as a daycare, just drop their kids off for 2 hours, then pick them up, exhausted from the swimming, and let them nap the rest of the day. I always had a huge problem with this, because I could not understand the state of mind that would allow their children to be babysat in a pool full of water, basically the most dangerous place for someone to be if they can't swim.

The hours where terrible, the pay was awful, and the children were terrible, but the worst part was what standing in chlorinated water for 8 hours a day does to your feet. My feet were absolutely ruined by the second week... the bottoms of my feet would slowly start to dry out by the end of the first week, and by the second week I had cracks in my feet so deep I could literally insert a whole penny into the largest one.

For the project, I thought long and hard about how I wanted to portray this. I eventually decided to try to portray something very negative in a very child-like, almost positive and fun looking way. People would constantly be telling me that I shouldn't complain and that children are adorable and cute and happy, but I had very good reason to start truly disliking them. For this reason, I wanted to have my posters attempt to portray the same thing- this childlike happiness and cartooniness that is somehow turned annoying or unsavory.

To achieve what I was going for, I wanted to choose very simple tag-lines that would embody some of the essences of the job. I ended up choosing “volume in numbers” to express the sheer volume that tens of screaming and crying kids make. I chose “sink or swim” and paired it with the image of a young boy, excitedly jumping in the water, then realizing he has made a terrible mistake because he can't swim. I also used the phrase “head count!” to express how much anxiety was caused by all of the children needing to constantly be accounted for. There where frequent head counts.

I am very satisfied with how my finals turned out. I think I achieved everything I wanted to. I also made the conscious decision to print them very large. I did this because the job cause almost the opposite effect of claustrophobia- the pool was enormous, and there was constant fear of losing a child, so I made the posters huge to reflect this.