I really don’t want to sound like a gym douche, but I think I have some justification for the gripes I have with my gym. Gym douches gripe about inconsequential matters, like whining about the influx of new members after Thanksgiving, New Years, and prior to Spring Break. And how they clog up all the machines and weight stations with their low-impact, laughable-to-them weight numbers. About how they might not be doing something properly, or their choice of gym attire is too new and fashionable to look like a serious gym-goer.
No, I don’t have problems with any of that, because none of that is particularly surprising. All of the above happens all the time, every year, like clockwork, so that stuff doesn’t really bother me that much, not to where I feel the need to gripe about it. My gym gripes are mostly related to the fact that my gym is staffed, or rather in this case, not adequately staffed, and that the gym’s clientele is full of inconsiderate, rude, mostly meathead, assholes.
I go to my gym because it’s extremely convenient; it’s literally right where I work, so I can go during lunch, immediately after work, or with Jen after she’s off. The convenience of location is the sole reason why I go to this gym on a regular basis, but if there were another one say closer to my home, or en route towards my home, I would switch to there in a heartbeat’s heartbeat.
But convenience of location aside, this gym and the experience it provides sucks. Allow me to list the ways.
- The gym itself is a good gym. But administratively, it’s horrendous. They have people up front, and they have salespeople, whose jobs are to walk prospective members around and to do paperwork and administrative shit like that. Aside from that, the gym has pretty much nobody else – meaning nobody to monitor the gym itself; make sure nobody needs help, enforcing courtesy rules like no cell phones, bogarting machines or camping on caridio equipment. Instead, they have a lazy apathetic custodial staff that often lets perishable materials like paper towels and sanitizer go empty all the time, and a handful of personal trainers who don’t give a shit about gym rules or helping out members, because their job is to sell themselves and the “service” they provide with private training. I get the impression the gym thought that the personal trainers would double as floor staff, but they’re either one, always in the middle of private sessions, or two, trying to sell sessions instead of monitoring house activity.
With nobody policing any of the house rules, the inmates run rampant with abuse of them, leading to a shitty experience for mindful members like me - The members of this gym are the worst gym goers that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I’ve been a regular member to four different gyms in my life, and this one is by far, easily the worst group of inconsiderate, oblivious, stupid and ignorant gym goers I’ve ever seen. The phrase “million dollar bodies, ten-cent brains” easily comes to mind when I think about a lot of the people who exercise here, but then again there’s a whole lot of ten-cent body/ten-cent brain types as well, which is kind of an ironic no-win for those people, seeing as I’d hope they’d at least be smart to make up for the fact that they’re out of shape fucks. If there were no people at this gym, it would be the best gym on the planet. But since there are people, way too many of them, let me elaborate why they make this gym the worst on the planet.
- There are simply too fucking many people at the gym. Go after work, and a 45 minute workout takes 90 minutes. Any time you want to do a particular exercise, that machine/station will be in use, as will your fallbacks A, B and C. You will be left standing and steaming at the aggravation in how packed the place gets after work.
- Many people are obsessed with their iDevices, and either they’re actually on the phone while leisurely strolling on a treadmill, or their tinkering with their toys leads to lots of wasted time and unnecessary and inconsiderate resting on machines or stations. I’m sorry you can’t get to Benny Benassi bass-thumping song #646 from #266 easily, but you’re wasting your time and more importantly, my time.
- Nobody wipes down a machine after they use it, this is pretty self-explanatory.
- Nobody re-racks free weights when they’re done using them, this is also self-explanatory.
- When you want two 40 lb. dumbbells, they will all be gone. Or worse, one of eight will be left, in an inadvertently, yet no less infuriating patronizing manner. Most cases, the second one will have been placed in a 10 lb. slot, because the previous user is fucking retarded, fucking lazy, illiterate, or all of the above.
- The machine weights may as well be Japanese sleep capsules, because 100% of the time you want to do anything, someone is already sitting there, resting. Or resting while they’re tinkering with their iDevice. When I look at someone sitting on an abs machine or back extensions looking exhausted or playing on their iPhone, I shake my head as the tune from Final Fantasy 2 when you go to an Inn plays in my head.
- You cannot walk in a straight line, anywhere. There will always be someone in front of you. Whether they’re chatting with someone resting on a machine, or someone actually working out doing dumbbell lunges, but most of the time it’s some wuss on their iDevice, not paying attention to how in the way they are.
- Last and definitely least, are the legions of people who exist at the gym for no other reason than to pose and show off their muscles, or lack of, but think they have. The types that grunt and scream no matter how much the rules that cycle on electronic screens plead they don’t, it happens. All through a workout, you’ll hear the dull thuds, and if close enough, feel the slight tremor in the ground from all the weights being dropped on the ground. It’s inevitable.
But I need to digress a bit. I’m losing my resolve in writing about this, but the fact of the matter is that I’m pretty sure I hate my gym. It’s not so much of the fault of the gym as much as it is simply the fact that the worst people on the planet manage to populate this place. It’s very likely due to location; my first gym was in Virginia, and I mostly went in early AM hours, by second one was in suburbia; they had a few suspect people, but overall it was fine. The third was private, so most people were conscious enough to be mindful of people they’d see, every single day. But this gym, being in the heart of superficial gay Midtown Atlanta, I’m finding is practically the worst pool of narcissistic, inconsiderate, yet Zoolander-stupid people on the planet.
