Know Your Role

Just as in life, there are many different projects here at Pom Pom that people excel at and are not so good at. I would categorize projects here into two categories: Physical and intellectual.

Physical: ARC reef building and installment, anemone cage cleaning, COTS collection, biscuit scrubbing

Intellectual: Fish, coral, and invertebrate identification, surveying

It is to no surprise of my own that I have gravitated towards the physical tasks. It didn’t take me long to realize that not only am I not an asset to the intellectual projects, but I’m actually a hindrance. After failing the invertebrate test once by getting a whopping 30/71 correct and failing it a second time, along with going on multiple identification dives and failing to identify more than half of the fish and coral correctly, I got the point. At TRACC, they don’t want to give up on you and want everyone to exceed at each project. After a few weeks of ducking out of tests and surveys, I had to keep it real. My strengths lie in the manual labor of hammering artificial reef blocks into the ground, churning cement and shoveling sand, and cleaning cages under 5 feet of water.

I discussed this with a dive master recently after he asked why for weeks I haven’t shown up to retake the invertebrate test. I had to level with him- dude, I’m not gonna pass it and if I do, do you really want me to be responsible for counting invertebrate on a survey line for data purposes? He agreed, saying he appreciated the honestly and also agreed with my severe inability to identify anything underwater, confirming me as the liability I knew I was.

As a result, I’m eternally assigned to make cinderblocks, scrub cages, collect hazardous sea stars and scrub coral. Can’t complain, gotta get a work out somehow. Also ya girl can’t pass a test here to save her life, but at least I’m honest?