I love gyms. I love the atmosphere, the people, the weights, that feeling you get when you just completed a great workout. But I also hate gyms. The pesky trainers, the guy that likes using my favorite treadmill, the people that just get in the way of your workout running smoothly and of course the membership sales people, the money-hungry big-gyms and the whole “closing early on sunday” thing.... ah... that’s what I will bitch about today [please note that most of this post was written on my iPhone while waiting for a sales person]. So here I am, visiting my mother, about 45 minutes from home. It’s sunday afternoon... even if I fly down the parkway, I’ll get a 30 minute workout... tops! So I head to my old gym... a gym that has over 100 locations within the tri-state area, a gym that I’ve belonged to since I was old enough to drive, a gym that I have worked for, a gym that has charged me sixty-something dollars a month for as long as I can remember (at least they kept my low rate, all these years), a gym that “automatically renewed” my membership at least 3 times, a gym that apologized when I wanted to leave by shutting me up with a backpack and promising to keep me at my old monthly rate, a gym that still charged me the sixty-something dollars when I moved 2500 miles away and even after I submitted all the required paperwork to get me out of my “2-year contract” they kept charging me because they needed more “proof” that I had moved,  a gym from which I finally, after years of attachment, was able to break free a mere month before when I accidentally asked the front desk girl at some random location to check when my membership was up...  “oh... today” she replied. I was ecstatic, and demanded that she cancel it at once. She called over the guy that seemed to be the manager, who told me that he couldn’t cancel my membership and the one person that could press the “cancel” button was a Mike, who would be back the next morning... who was not available when I came back, so I went to a different location which was happy to cancel my membership for me without giving me any shit...... so I walk into this gym, a gym that is open til 7PM... and even though they have put me through a nightmare, the convenience of having 3 extra hours on the weekends and many locations to choose from seems tempting once more and almost worth it (especially since my other gym membership expires in a week)... I am greeted by a 16 year old douche who thinks he is better than me because he is on the phone and is giving me a “what the fuck do you want” look. I ask for a guest pass... he asks me for $15. I say “since when?”... OK, so maybe it came out wrong. He didn’t know me, that’s OK. I’m not special. I’m not entitled to work out for free.... but I KNOW that big gyms like this one have a simple policy... refer the potential client to a sales person who will give them a guest pass (sometimes even a week pass), get them to fill out a form, get their info and harass them for the next 3 months until they either join or get a restraining order. I know because I used to do it... for this company. I wouldn’t walk into ANY gym making such quasi-unreasonable demands, but a gym that upheld this practice only three months ago and over the half a decade that i’ve paid attention..... I figured I’d give it a shot.  I asked the kid to get me a “Membership Consultant” ... he seemed rather unwilling to get off his ass and find me someone who was more of a people person than himself... a few minutes later a familiar middle-aged pumpkin-shaped lady rushed over to me, greeting me with compliments and questions.... “oh you look great! how’s school? how’s everything? how was vegas?” I forgot her name, but she knew mine. She said she needed to finish up with a client and then I could go ahead and work out. ATTN MEMBERSHIP PEOPLE: the longer I wait, the smaller the chance of me ever coming back, let alone joining... especially since at this point my chances of joining were pretty high... next to certain, I’d say. Maybe she wouldn’t make a sale that day... but it’s a guarantee that I’d come back... after all I was coming back to the area and this was MY gym. I know people who get freebies all the time from her, from this gym, from their other locations...  definitely past members and definitely past employees.... this is just how they are, how they try to convince you to come back... I just want to do legs... NOW... then you can take my money... but just let me do legs because every other gym is closing (i get obsessive when i don’t work out). You are going to con me into a 2-year contract paying you $90 a month.... so it’s really not too much to ask for.... as I have already been waiting for 20 minutes as this woman is giving a couple a TOUR of the gym... a motherfucking TOUR! Couldn’t she just deal with me first? I already filled out the necessary slip for my workout, and am contemplating just paying the kid and getting it over with.... but I’m stubborn. I paid these people way too much already, about 6 months too much...and I am not backing down. I want to know how much of my time she is going to waste... now I’m curious...

....eventually she comes to me, apologizes, leads me into her office, tells me she had to handle some problem with the couple, signs the slip that I hand her, hands me a scan tag valid for 3 days, and I am off to TRY to do legs...

Time it took her to deal with me: 94 seconds
Time she spent selling the couple a membership: 72 min

So, I have vowed to never go to ANY of this company’s gyms (I don’t usually vow to do anything, so this is new). This is going to be very difficult... since I seem to have grown quite attached to them all, having done a dozen workouts a week at their oh-so-many convenient locations... yes, I am obsessed, but that is not the issue at hand. A few days later I went to another gym I used to frequent, it’s a gym that tells you when your membership is up, a gym that lets you sign up for less than a year, a gym whose sales people are human and are the same people who sell you bottled water at the front desk and couldn’t care less about leaving you voice mails pleading you to come back for a special low rate of $72.86 per month if you sign a 7-year contract, a gym where it takes a day to get a "put your weights back" sign, rather than 3 corporate memos, 2 managers, a regional manager and a "signage consultant" who (two months later) concludes that the sign is unnecessary since there is a note by the water fountain in size eight font that states the gym's rules and regulations, a gym where everything is as easy as it seems and no one makes anything difficult, a gym where the same rules apply to everyone.... a gym I had absolutely no problem paying $20 to work out for a day.