ON FUN ~ Sole Survivor...

GYM RATS - #13

In the two years that I have been a loyal member of my gym, there is only one employee who is still there from the day I signed up. Makes me wonder why the employees aren’t as loyal to the gym as I have been.

Part of the problem is that the gym requires trainers to be on-site all the time to help members with questions. However, members usually either know what they are doing already, or don’t know anything at all and need a paid full training session. Not a lot of people can afford training sessions on a regular basis so these trainers wander around with nothing to do, get bored and quit.

I’ve seen several members turn into employees, lured by the free use of the gym. This always confuses me because one day they are just plodding along like the rest of us and the next day they are creating work-out routines for paying customers. Their personal routines weren’t that varied. Is there a book of routines somewhere that they hand out when you take the job? Don’t they need some sort of certification or at least trainer training? They never last for very long either.

So it must be that the pay is really low - low enough for that many people to quit a job that doesn’t require formal training, pays you to sit around with nothing to do but check out all the hot members and watch TV.

I stopped trying to learn their names or carry on conversations after a while. It is like one of those friends who always has a new boyfriend - just when you get to know him she is on to someone new. Why bother? A trainer would go MIA for a while and then I would notice and realize that they hadn’t been on a really long vacation after all. For a while I thought they just switched shifts. But there aren’t enough shifts for that many people to all have moved to.

Every now and then, one of them will be too tempted by the boredom and lose any semblance of professionalism or duty. They blatantly goof off, chat on the phone, have friends stop by or put up the self-scanner and go work out while on the job. You start to hear the other employees grumbling about them behind their back and a few days later they are on that permanent vacation themselves.

The sole survivor from my first day of membership mans the desk with a smile, chatting with members about whatever is on their mind, and never works out. He is fat and happy - and must be related to someone in the organization. Why else would he stick around so long?

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