I hate carpools so freaking much, I ended up writing a list of 4 reasons why I hate carpools.
However, before you think or say anything though, you need to understand that I don’t hate carpooling or carpoolers. In fact, I encourage carpooling. It reduces environmental pollution and gives people a reason to actually keep their SUVs (or buy them)! I’m talking about about the other type of carpools. For those of you that don’t know what I’m even talking about, this is my arch nemesis:
A Polaris Automatic Pool Cleaner
Okay, so they’re technically defined as “Automatic Pool Cleaners” or “APCs”, but I call them carpools. You can go up to a pool store and they’ll know what you’re talking about. Trust me, I’ve done it several times. So, just accept my weird-ass wording and learn to live with it. Hell, you may end up calling them carpools as well! But anyways, on to the list:
1) Carpools just make us lazy.
Some will say, ‘No, they don’t make us lazy. They just make it easier to clean/maintain the pool.’ Yes, this is what we call lazy. You should work to keep your pool clean each time you use it. Going swimming in the pool should be like making a cake. Sure, you could go and purchase a cake at Sam’s Club or the Grocery Store and it might taste pretty good but, if you MAKE a cake, you know it will taste 20x better. Why? Because you put in the effort to make it. The same applies to swimming. Before you go swimming you remove all the leaves and bugs that are on the top as well as the bottom of the pool, that way, you know you got everything and the pool is nice and clean. If you do, you not only get a rewarding and refreshing feeling when you jump in the pool, you also won’t get the dreaded cramps after you swim because you didn’t do your warm up exercises. You lazy Carpool owners. Get up and work on your own damn pool. The machine isn’t your underwater leaf picking-up slave.
The worst part about it though, is that no one ever wants to empty the bag. If you’ve never had to empty a carpool bag, consider yourself lucky. That is the nastiest thing ever. I have no idea how sand actually gets into the pool, especially since I live about two hours away from sand, but it some how gets in there. There’s also little rocks and things that get stuck in the velcro that closes the bag. Oh, and you can’t forget the week old dead bugs that have been soaking in the water. Ugh, its the equivalent of when you have to get a plastic bag and pick up your dog’s shit when walking him, with out the smell though. Plus, because the carpool has made us lazy, usually no one has cleaned it for a week or so. We always just assume that it’s eating the leaves and shits in the trash can, thus magically eliminating the need for us to clean out the bag. However, because of this, the bag always bursts open and the stuff just floats around the pool and never gets cleaned.
2) Carpools constantly get in the way.
This has to be the most annoying reason to carpools. They always get in the damn way. They don’t magically don’t go into the carpool garage when they’re done. Oh no, instead they sit in the pool and float. It’s not only the “car” portion itself it’s the hose that attaches to it as well. The hose has to be as long as the pool so that the carpool can reach it right? That’s a lot of hose when you think about it. If you have a pool that is 30 feet long, there must be at least 15 feet of hose (if not more because depending on the placement of the “nozzle” on the wall). That means when it stops working, there’s going to be hosing SOME where where your swimming. So, you’re doing laps and half way through the pool, and now you have to navigate through the hosing. If you’ve never had to navigate through hosing while doing laps, by the time you’re done with one lap, you’ll feel like you’ve conquered the labyrinth and fought the minotaur half way through.
The mighty beast and his weapon.
But of course, with any minotaur fight, you’re guaranteed to get hurt some way through. Maybe I’m a moron, or maybe carpools and I just have a mutual hate for each other, but for some odd reason they have an act for coming after me. The other day while doing some laps in the pool, I decided to dive under the hoses (in hopes to avoid being tangled) and that’s when the carpool decided to float up and move to another location, but decided to also knock me on the head in the process. I swear it just came out of nowhere and gave me a nasty headache for the rest of the day.
3) Carpools always break. ALWAYS.
Okay, I don’t know if this happens to everyone else, but the one in my pool always breaks. Whether its a wheel, hole in the hose, or the damn thing falls off the nozzle, it is always broken. The most common repair? The o-ring on the nozzle is broken because the water pressure coming to the carpool is too strong and thus, it wears on the o-ring. But why do I hate them for this? Because guess who has to go get the part, and guess what parts are NEVER in stock? Yep, you guessed it. Mine. When it breaks, the bottom of the pool never gets cleaned (it’s because the carpool makes us lazy, remember?). So the pool begins to gather trash at the bottom. Finally, the part comes in, and I fix the damn thing, throw it in the water, and guess what? The damn o-ring breaks! The cycle then repeats. If that doesn’t happen, our dog likes to jump in take a swim and take a bite out of the hose. Why? Because it got in his way. So then I have to purchase ANOTHER part, and the hoses seem to take forever ever to find because each hose is unique for each carpool. Bastards. My pool is never clean.
4) Carpool companies have an act for trying to make them “cutesy” or “animal-like”.
This one kinda just makes me mad, and I don’t know why. Something about taking machines and making them look like animals or cute things to market them just mocks my intelligence. I guess if you have a small child who’s afraid of the mean carpool, it might make sense to own one of these. But seriously, it makes me angry when a machine who’s purpose is to clean the crap out off your pool’s floor is designed to look like a turtle or as Stewie Griffin will put it, “Nature’s D Student”. Here’s what I’m talking about:
Polaris' Turbo D-Student
Seriously, what the hell is that? Like why would a Turtle be a garbage picker-upper? Last time I checked, I had a four red eared sliders and not once would they eat a leaf found on the bottom of my pool. They had an affinity for the fake shit-flakes we fed them that floated on the top of their tank, and occasionally some bugs, but they didn’t particularly like the crap that I found at the bottom of my pool. But that’s not all. There’s also a ladybug, monster trucks, lawnmower/tractor thing, whale, and creepy yellow thing.
I guess the point it to make them more kid friendly, but if you make the carpool more kid friendly, then that just opens the flood gates. If you have one of these things with a tail, and you’re a parent, you know EXACTLY what I’m talking about. They get the carpool, grab it by the tail and shoot water at you as if it was an everlasting squirt gun that hurts like no other. Of course, as in my case, when you remove the thing from the pool, more than likely the bag will open up and put all the shit the carpool picked up and will put it right back where it was, in the pool. My brother ended up spraying the damn thing in my eye at one point. I don’t know about you but a stream of water in the eye hurts like a bitch slap in the face from Big Mikey the pimp down the street.
…Yeah, I just wrote a 1434 word rant on how much I hate Automatic Pool Cleaners. I really do hate them.
