Kill it.....Jerk

Well my summer hiatus has ended and now I must begin a new semester and, in doing so, a new entry to my blog.

As many of you know I keep myself busy during the summer working for the Town of Gilbert in the Aquatics department.  This past summer I was the head swim coach at Williams Field pool.  Along with my coaching responsibilities I also taught swimming and diving lessons to children between the ages of six months and 14 years old.

During one of my diving classes this summer I had my class of five girls lined up behind the diving board getting ready to practice the skill I had just taught them.  I believe they were getting ready to do pike two and one-half front flips…. oh no wait they were about to do kneeling dives.  Anyway, I had just completed y demonstration and was swimming to the side of the pool when I heard a five-girl chorus of screams.  Now these were not screams of pain or of joy, these were screams of terror.

I jumped out of the pool and ran to where the girls were huddled together.  They pointed to the side of the diving board and one of them said “There is a killer bee next to the board.”

I went over to investigate and found this:

I used a flip-flop that was next to me on the ground and hit it as hard as I could.  It laid there still and I left it where it was and continued class. The little girl whose shoe I used was very unhappy with me for doing so, but other than that I was looked at as a hero by this group of five and six year-olds.

Class ended and I took the bug back into our guardroom where I took these pictures:

Some of the other male lifeguards came in and thought it was as cool as I did but then the female coworkers entered the room.  They freaked out screaming and frantically telling me to kill it, not knowing it was already dead.  I explained that it had already moved on to a better place, having been motionless for 30 minutes.  They convinced themselves that it was just stunned and was going to wake up seeking revenge any minute. 

After telling me to kill it several more times I decided that I would just pull off the wings.  I figured that by doing this the girls would be satisfied that the hornet would not be able to sting them to death, and I would get to continue examining my find.

Well that was a mistake.  I was not the hero I thought I would be, instead I became the greatest villain the guardroom had ever known.  I was called a jerk by more than one of the girls.  Apparently, killing the bug would have been considered heroic, but pulling off the wings was inhumane.

I admit that I do not support animal cruelty, but the thing was already dead and was heading for the trash can anyway.  Luckily, the whole thing was forgotten by the next day and I was not hated anymore.

My boss and I looked up pictures of the bug and decided that it was a European Hornet. Why it was so far from Europe the world may never know.