Painting Numbers On Sites

When we accepted the job at a private RV Park we knew it would be a different experience from working at a Federal or State Park. We’ve been here two months now and have found we like it quite a lot. We love the amenities and since we are both working for the site we only work a day and a half each per week, leaving ample time to take advantage of them.

As we get to know our fellow workcampers, we have found that most of them are experienced working for private parks. Only one other couple has worked for a federal recreation area and that happens to be our work  companions from Saylorville Lake who happened by pure coincidence to end up, not only at the same park as us this year, but just a few sites away.

The main take away from our conversations has been to absolutely insist on a detailed written job description along with a photograph of your site. Many use Google Earth to get a current picture. Case in point, the Maintenance Department that Champ and Paul are working with has undergone a lot of turnover with work campers this season. When Paul got hired here, they told him his main job for the winter would be painting new numbers on the over 1200 sites here. Sounds like a pretty nice gig! When he and Champ met with the maintenance supervisor the first day, he told them it wasn’t a priority and that their primary job was to keep the park looking nice. Most days that means, curbside garbage collection. Other days there are light maintenance jobs, power washing, picking up the pieces of palm bark and fronds, otherwise known as “Palm Poop”. You get the picture.   A couple days a month Champ spends the day in the street sweeper. His very first job as a teenager was working a garbage route. He jokes now that after a long career as a crane operator, then 26 years at the Department of Transportation, he has come full circle back to collecting trash. He even got to ride on the back of the compactor truck the other day. So far, they have been tasked with repainting the number on exactly one site. Only because the resident complained they weren’t getting their Amazon deliveries because the site number was worn off.

Early on, one of the maintenance workers left because he hated the work. The new guy Jim, showed up and announced, he had been hired to paint numbers on all the sites. We tried not to snicker and smiled to ourselves the next week when he joined Paul on trash duty. He transferred to the I.T. department when they lost a tech a couple of weeks ago and John showed up in the park to join the maintenance team. You guessed it,  he told us he had been hired to paint numbers on the sites! We didn’t even try to stifle the chuckles that time. Apparently, the volunteer coordinator and the head of maintenance are not on the same page in terms of what it means to work in maintenance. The standing joke here is that painting numbers on sites must be code for picking up garbage. The moral of the story is, get it in writing. I’m sure the park's job description, if they even have one, has more bullet points than painting site numbers.

All that aside, we are having a pretty good experience. The weather is awesome. We like the area and are taking part in many of the activities and taking advantage of the pool and hot tub. I'm getting plenty of opportunity to go birding and have seen a number of species for the first time. Many of which I will not see anywhere but in the Rio Grande Valley.  We are meeting many new people and have formed a group of friends here in the park, some workcampers, some not. We’ll pursue other private park jobs in future winters and put into practice some of the job seeking and negotiating tactics that other, more experienced private park volunteers use to be sure that their experience is a positive one. The federal park jobs always have very detailed job descriptions and some have what is called a ‘Volunteer Bill of Rights’ that detail expectations and responsibilities of both the work campers and the park rangers who supervise them. Private parks don’t do as good a job with that part. We have learned from others that Google will often yield some sources of reviews of past 

workcampers at various places. Reviews should always be taken with a grain of salt of course but if there is a pattern of bad experience, it will likely show up in repetitive negative feedback. After all, review writers are more often motivated by bad experiences, than good. 

In the meantime, I’ll be working in the office and the guys will be ‘painting numbers on sites’. In between we’ll lounge around the pool, on someone’s patio or at a card table somewhere in the park, while we watch the blizzards and freezing temperatures up north in our new feeds a safe distance 1500 miles south of home.

Until next time…