Friday, January 09, 2009

Health club morons

Here's the sort of thing that ruffles my otherwise sunny disposition.

My health club is always crowded in early January - the marginal attendees either are working off their holiday weight or else haven't abandoned their New Year's resolutions yet. There is a particular type of elliptical machine I favor, and 4 of the 5 were in use when I got there this morning. I was about to start using the fifth, when a woman who was standing about 8 feet away from it, talking earnestly on her cellphone (BTW, the sign in the room says "No cellphones"), came up to me and said: "I'm still on that machine."

Clearly this was not literally so. But I walked away rather than start a dispute. She lingered close to the machine for a moment, then retreated to her post 8 feet away and resumed her animated conversation. Seething a bit, I went upstairs to do something else, and when I came back down five minutes later she was gone.

1 comment:

Craig M. Boise said...

you've touched on a particular pet peeve of mine--the new years resolution crowd that invades the gym for the first few weeks of the year and then gradually disappears. i've thought it would be interesting to calculate "new year's resolution freedom day" like we calculate tax freedom day. the former would be the day by which, on average, people making fitness-related new year's resolutions finally abandon them and relinquish the gym to the folks who show up all year long.