Clarification: Nobody should touch you in the fashion you were touched. E.g., when you said No, “trainer” boy should have backed right off.
Now that would encourage me to go to the gym. 
To clarify: I know no one should ever touch me uninvited. I originally had a little section in there about guys that think it is ok to rub my shoulders because I look “tense” or rub my neck or rub my thigh reassurringly, but I took it out. I don’t like being touched, damnit.
And, as I said, creepy guys stare a lot at the gym, but no one has ever touched me. It was just exceptionally weird that it happened twice in a day.
DiosaBellisima, I’d invite you to my gym, but there is a problem.
Pro: at my gym, the “you’re here to work, not mack on chicks/dudes” rule is enforced with stun-guns. The old kind that lock up all your muscles. It’s just our way of helping you work those muscles while reinforcing proper social behavior, free of charge here at Happy Scrappy Body Sculpting.
Con: There are no magazines here. The “you’re here to work” rule means that, if you’re actually able to concentrate on your place in Cosmo, the staff is authorized to override the speed controls on your cardio machine and crank it to the point where you no longer can. Here at Happy Scrappy Body Sculpting, we look out for you even when you don’t look out for yourself. No need to thank us.
BUT, coming this fall,
There will be TWO, yes, TWO levels to Happy Scrappy Body Sculpting.
Each level will be identical in layout and equipment.
But level one will be reserved for those who are getting INTO shape. The bigger dude who needs an hour on the treadmill. The chubby kid whose parents bought him the membership as a shame/birthday present. The housewife who needs to do 5 sets of 15 flyes with light weights. The older dude who benches 65. Trainers will be encouraging, laid-back, quietly assertive.
Level two will be for hard-guys, meatheads, those who sprinkle andro on their cornflakes. The bouncer for whom a gym membership is a work-related expense. The chick who can do a hundred incline sit-ups with a 5-kilo medicine ball. The guy who makes the heavy-bag cry for its momma. Trainers will be eye-popping drill sergeants on crack.
The levels will be split from ground level. Level one at 1/2 story, level 2 at 1 1/2 stories, so one group won’t have to take ridicule from the other on the way in.
Pool in the basement, accessible ONLY by walking through a short corridor of waterjets.
It shall be against the rules for the blonde hottie, who is waiting patiently for me to finish with the lat machine, and who I am quite sure is deeply impressed by my broad, muscular back, to address me as “Sir”. It makes me feel like I am thirty years older than her.
Twenty-eight, tops.
Regards,
Shodan
The place I used to train in had city cops patrolling the workout areas. One of the reasons why I stopped training there–it suddenly occurred to me that, if a firefight broke out, the only things in the building that would stop bullets were the people.
Which reminds me of another one:
I realize the sauna is right next to the pool. I realize it gets hot in the sauna: that’s why people go into them. I also realize there’s a Norski tradition of (a) sauna then (b) jump in the lake, all sweaty and fully-clothed in sweat-sodden clothes.
The pool is not your damn lake. I’m swimming in it, and I’d like to be able to see the lane line at the bottom while swimming my laps, not a spreading miasma of funk left by your sweaty, nasty self deciding to cool off after a sauna. That’s what the showers are for.
And that is the main reason I stopped going to the gym. I couldn’t see the lane lines at the bottom of a 4’ deep lap pool because the water got that nasty.
-
Don’t talk on your goddamned cell phone in the locker room. Yes, it is much quieter than the rest of the gym. So is the front enterance and the yard outside. Think you’re alone just because there’s only one other person in there - in the shower? What would YOU do if you’re standing in the shower and you hear “HELLO?” You’d answer, right? Yeah and then if you’re like me you feel like an idiot when you hear “Yeah, I’m at the gym.”
-
Ladies…I don’t care that you had to take the kiddies swimming all by your lonesome while Mr. Fabulous stayed home. Good thing there’s a “Family Changing Room”, eh? You could take your son in THERE instead of, like, letting him hang out in the women’s locker room with me and my nekkid butt. Yes I do wear a towel, but at some point the towel has to come off before I get my clothes on. Does your 5 year old really need to see my tits?
AND…if you’re going to piss me off by bringing your little boys into the locker room do NOT piss me off further by noting, when finished, “let’s go outside and wait for Daddy to finish changing.” DADDY??? Daddy is here and you still need to bring your son to see my naked ass!!!
- Also ladies…a shower stall is NOT a changing table for your baby. Nope. It’s a shower, for me to shower in. A cramped, tiny, wet little room with no ventalation for poopie-stink to escape from. Pretty sure they have one of those nifty pull-down tables over there. Over THERE…not in the shower. I hope your kid gets scabies from the shower floor.
Otherwise…my gym is pretty nice 
Seems I only run into idiots in the locker room - specifically idiot moms with their nasty kids who came to use the pool. They don’t hang out in the weight room or upstairs around the track. All those folks out there keep to themselves.
I can pretty much guarantee that my friends who are gay do not go to the gym to experience an overweight and soaking wet named 59-year-old flopping up against them as they try to extricate their belongings from a locker without accidentally spooning said stranger.
But that’s just an assumption. I haven’t asked.
While I’m sure he is named, what I meant was naked. See, “k” and “m” are right next to each…other…oh, never mind…
Now, see, I thought you meant “soaking-wet-maned”
“Honey, be nice, or Mommy won’t let you come in the lady’s locker room with her anymore.”
Junior’s on his best behavior all day. Sure as hell beats a time out.
Is there such a thing as this? I have no interest in dragging my 48-year-old pot belly and short-windedness to a gym only to be sneered at.
Band na-
: Takes a 5 lbs dumbbell to the back of the head :
What the- Anyway, Dio-Bel, where the hell do you train? A prison yard? Admittedly, I’m one of the guys whose eyes tend to linger a bit too long on the spandex-wrapped ass of the redhead on the elliptical, but those guys are assclowns. If I were around when they were doing stuff like that they’d be eating dumbbells and crapping medicine balls.
On a lighter note:
So you’re banning Batman? I hope you’re prepared for the consequences. 
Why wouldn’t someone wear underwear under their clothing?
[QUOTE=ZipperJJ<snip>- Ladies…I don’t care that you had to take the kiddies swimming all by your lonesome while Mr. Fabulous stayed home. Good thing there’s a “Family Changing Room”, eh? You could take your son in THERE instead of, like, letting him hang out in the women’s locker room with me and my nekkid butt. Yes I do wear a towel, but at some point the towel has to come off before I get my clothes on. Does your 5 year old really need to see my tits?
AND…if you’re going to piss me off by bringing your little boys into the locker room do NOT piss me off further by noting, when finished, “let’s go outside and wait for Daddy to finish changing.” DADDY??? Daddy is here and you still need to bring your son to see my naked ass!!!
<snip>[/QUOTE]
I ranted about this way back when - I was in the ladies’ change room at the local Y, when a woman brought her, oh, I don’t know, 9 or 10 year old son in with her. :eek: I totally should have reported her, looking back on it. That was way over the line. (I’m trying to remember if there were family change rooms there - probably.)
Oh, my darling Wolfie- I wish I trained in a prison yard! I could have paid some large, dumb guys off with some cigs and received some personal security (although, I still like my Navy Seal idea).
As I told one of my friends: I don’t get why guys bother me (the chick in the tank top and baggy, grey sweats who CLEARLY doesn’t want to be bothered) when there is that 110 lb blonde on the treadmill who is just screaming "PLEASE LOOK AT ME!!! Daddy never hugged me so I need male attention in any way I can get! Yes ANY way " (the chicks I speak of regularly wear shorts where their butt cheeks are hanging out, LOW CUT sports bras that can barely contain the $5000 silicone investment on their chest, and whose eyes are darting from man to man just trying to make eye contact…aw hell! I’d do the same thing if I looked that good and I also stare, but c’mon).
So, Wolfie darling, would you like to do some contract work in security?
Do we need to make it a rule that you’re not supposed to eat while working out? I wouldn’t have thought so, until my last gym at least. Yes lady, that orange counts as food.
No one is allowed to wear enough perfume or cologne, that the stench is actually visible. Use deoderant if your sweat can gag a maggot, the cover-up route is not a substitute for basic hygeine.
If you pop your gum, I am allowed to snatch it out of your mouth and shove it into any of your body orifices I deem appropriate.
For the gym owner/staff: lower the volume and please, please, please do not ever play anything by Cher, ever again. That goes goddam double for Ricky Martin. I know some will think it sacrilege that I don’t want to hear Cher, but you’ve no idea what listening to the same four songs for an entire year can do to a person. *Do you belieeeeve in looove… * Gah!
And when we say clothing, we mean clothing. Not some rags that were once a shirt and a few scraps of denim hanging from a belt. I don’t wear my sunday best to the gym either, but I also don’t dress like an extra from Conan the Barbarian Vs Mad Max Vs Tarzan.
So, what’s “stripping the bar”?
Taking the plates off a bar when you are finished using it.
Well, my gym has a “women’s only” weight room, presumably so they can get some workout in without being bothered by some wannabe-trainer giving them crappy advice and “spotting” for them. I don’t think that applies to you, though.
That said, except for really serious weight training gyms filled with steroid pumped meatheads, nobody’s going to sneer at you for being out of shape. Especially since there will be a ton of people in the same situation as you.