The deep end may be down for maintenance

By 2030 the price board at a municipal pool could carry a line of small print longer than the price. Under a scheme being trialled by one regional leisure operator, admission would remain valid at all times except during the water's scheduled maintenance window.

Public pools and leisure centres increasingly depend on connected management software for entry, booking, water-quality monitoring and energy control, and many operators have moved to cashless, app-based access. Physical equipment of all kinds, from cars to heating systems to industrial machinery, now relies on vendor servers, and scheduled maintenance or outages on the vendor's side can leave the hardware in a degraded state. Public pools in many towns have cut hours or closed in recent years because of energy costs and local budget pressure, and their operation is frequently outsourced to private leisure operators. The terms of service for digital platforms routinely exclude compensation for downtime.

Adult swim, 6.40. Concessions, 4.10. Under this, in eight-point type, the notice: admission is subject to scheduled platform maintenance; water may be unavailable or in a reduced state during maintenance windows; times are published in the app and may change; no refunds are offered for windows announced with more than four hours' notice. The wording would appear on the turnstile, in the app, and on a laminated card at the desk, where staff would be instructed to point at it rather than read it aloud. The card is the only part of the pool that never needs an update.

The pool in question would run, like most built or refurbished since the late twenties, on a single connected system. The same software would dose the chlorine, count the swimmers per lane, open the lockers, set the temperature and decide when the wave machine is allowed to start. The operator's contract with the software vendor would include a monthly maintenance window, during which the vendor reserves the right to restart everything. The window would originally be scheduled for three in the morning in the vendor's own time zone. In the pool's time zone, that is the aqua-aerobics class.

During the window the pool would enter what the vendor's documentation calls a reduced service state. Lane counting would stop, so the lanes would be closed. The depth markers, which are screens, would show a spinning circle. The chlorine dosing would hold at its last known value, which the operator's insurers consider acceptable for up to ninety minutes. The lockers would remain locked, which is described as a safety feature. Swimmers already in the water would be asked to leave it and stand on the side in their costumes until the water is available again. Towels are not provided for the window.

Regulars would adapt. Doreen Halsall, seventy-one, who has swum forty lengths at the same pool every Tuesday for thirty years, would begin timing her session to finish before the restart. “You learn the signs,” she would say. “The lights go a bit blue, the lifeguard's tablet makes a noise, and then everybody gets out and looks at the deep end.” Some swimmers would report that the water feels different after an update, though the operator says the water is not affected and only the software that describes it is. Mrs Halsall would say she does not swim in the description.

The windows would multiply. A monthly window would become a fortnightly one after a security incident at another operator's pool, in which a swimmer was found to have booked the entire deep end. Emergency patches would be announced with the minimum four hours' notice, which under the small print entitles nobody to anything. One leisure centre would trial a “hot-patch lane”, a single lane that stays open during updates because it runs on an older system nobody has been able to switch off. It would become the most popular lane in the building, with a waiting list and its own small print.

The operator would concede that the arrangement is imperfect. A director of aquatic operations, in a written statement, would say that the maintenance windows are essential to keeping the water safe, secure and compliant, and that the company is working with its vendor to move them to a time when fewer people wish to swim. Asked when that time is, the statement would refer to the app. The app would at that moment be undergoing its own maintenance, and would refer to the laminated card.

Lifeguards would be retrained. Instead of watching the water, they would be asked during windows to watch a progress bar, and to blow the whistle when it reaches one hundred. Andrej Kovar, a lifeguard at a pool outside a mid-sized town, would say the job has changed less than people think. “You're still waiting for something to happen that you can't control,” he would say. “It's just that now it happens at eleven fifteen.” At the end of one window, the system would come back and report that the pool was at full depth, fully chlorinated and twenty-nine degrees. It would be right about two of these.