Drop and give me 20! (IQ points, that is.)

[captainsblog]

I haven't been keeping up postings on my Dreamwidth blog, where I'd been chronicling my recent efforts to get in better shape in my older age. I'll be updating there soon, since good things have been happening to me in the past several months. Most of that has been a result of going to the Little Gym That Could on Main Street, where I work with a trainer and, now, also do some of my cardio and get weekly advice sessions on diet and form and whatnot. 

This post, though, focuses on the Other Place, the Bigass Gym in the strip mawl on Sheridan, where I still do most of my cardio. (Victor's place is quieter and nicer for it, but he only has two ellipticals, and I rather prefer the brand that the World Gym has a ton of.) So it was I wound up in there earlier this evening, after a long day on the road but with a good morning result for a client, a fixed pair of eyeglasses, and Donald Westlake's last novel to keep me company.

Although they've got decent-sized locker rooms (at least the guys' is;), the trend seems to be for most people to just stash their stuff in one of two big racks of cubbies near the front desk. Especially around evening spinning or Zumba time, it can get pretty bottlenecked around there as exercisers of both genders both strip and rebundle themselves right in front of the juice bar, leaving their coats and keys and other trappings of home in one or two of the available slots.

In the past, I'd noticed some questionable judgment on the part of some of the gym rats. Not just keys and glasses, but smartphones, watches and even one driver's license appeared in the cubbies at one time or another. After I was grabbing my own coat and leaving tonight, though, I saw someone else who had pushed his cubby contents to the point of what I would consider un-bear-able:



Reference is made to the one on the bottom. See anything unusual in there?

I say "his cubby," because as I was putting on my coat and furtively lining up that shot, "he" came by from the free weight area to check his messages, slog down another shot of his energy drink, and head back to his barbells with as few pounds of clue on his rack as he had when he got there. I seriously considered saying something to him about it- dude, I'm a lawyer and I know how much of a PITA it is to cancel a stolen credit card, much less re-establish your identity if someone steals it out of there. Yet I looked at him, and quietly sang an old song to myself from college days, done by a one-hit-wonderband somewhere upstate known as Blotto:

He lifts weights,
He builds cars,
And he's got no sense of humor,
She's got a big, really big, got a really really big boyfriend....

Do you think me a wuss for not trying to give him the very missing clue here? (I also considered just grabbing it, leaving it at the front desk with a note left behind that I'd done so, but they have the place on constant video surveillance and I didn't want to be misunderstood- partly a function of reading the Westlake book in which the protagonist is VERY much so not comprehended.)

In the end, I decided I will stop in tomorrow, tell the tale, give them a printout of the picture and ask them to put up a warning about people not being dumbasses. Which, I know, does presuppose a certain single-digit grade level in reading, but it's worth a shot.

Comments

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

You surprised me with the Blotto reference! I thought my brother and I were the only ones who sang those lyrics to themselves. I get "metalhead" and "goodbye mr. bond" in my head pretty frequently.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I always get a kick out of shared memories. A while back, I made a reference to "Psycho Chicken," a Talking Heads parody by a Boston band called the Fools from that era, and one of our friends here had a similar reaction, buying their last album almost on the spot.

[urbpan.livejournal.com]

I was under the impression that Rick Dees was somehow involved with that?