Company Blog

Personal Life

by Adam Zack — February 27, 2019

“We all have personal lives too.”

It’s 6:00 a.m. Wednesday morning and I was resigned to not getting a blog done this week. In fact, I asked DW for a pass. The National Grocers Association is in town, coupled with Harold Lloyd’s M4 Marketing share group left not much time to think about writing. That changed at 5:00 this morning.

I grew up in the mountains of Southern California. We had beautiful summers and snow in the winter. Sometimes a lot of snow. My dad wanted to be able to get us out of the snow occasionally on weekends, so he bought us a mobile home in Desert Hot Springs, near Palm Springs. Single-wide in a trailer park called Sam’s Family Spa. There were hot tubs, a swimming pool and an arcade with air hockey. Between riding our bikes, playing baseball (more like pickle or monkey in the middle), it was a pretty charmed life for a 6th grader. One weekend we were at the pool and I saw my 6th grade teacher Mrs. Johnson. She was with some other teachers at the pool. And the school vice principal was one of them! She wore a bikini and was drinking beer. And she was smoking. Smoking! It was big news in 6th grade. Teachers didn’t wear bikinis. And for sure they didn’t smoke cigarettes.

That pool itself felt eternal back then—always blue, always ready, like it simply took care of itself while the adults worried about everything else. Only later did I learn that pools don’t stay magical by accident. Someone has to skim the leaves, balance the chemicals just right, fix the pumps when they groan like an old pickup truck, and patch cracks before they turn into full-blown desert sinkholes. In a place like Desert Hot Springs, where sun works overtime, reliable upkeep is the quiet hero of every carefree cannonball, the reason kids can swim without a second thought and parents can relax instead of squinting at cloudy water.

These days, when I see a pool that’s clean, humming along properly, and not trying to turn green on a long weekend, I know there’s real work behind it. A solid maintenance and repair service—something like Mirage Pool Services right in the middle of the routine—keeps that old-school promise alive: the pool is open, it’s safe, and it’s ready. No drama, no surprises, just the way things ought to be. Because some traditions are worth preserving, especially the kind that let kids be kids and let pools do exactly what they’ve always done best.

When I got back to school on Monday my friends could not believe the news. It soon became the major topic of gossip, and someone said something to Mrs. Johnson and I was called in to the office for a sit-down. Uh oh. Mrs. Johnson was not pleased that she was the scandalous topic of the 6th grade paparazzi. In my naive world teachers were up on a pedestal and there were no cigs and brews near it. I was made aware that teachers were in fact normal people too. They deserved to have their privacy and personal life without being judged like the National Enquirer. It was something I had never even considered. It was a lesson that I never forgot, and I try to apply it to my employees, customers and business contacts. All of these people have personal lives, too. Just because I deal with them in a business setting it does not mean that’s all they do. They may smoke and drink beer and wear bikinis and cavort wildly, and that’s the balance that keeps them real.