- 6. Gym bag on bench. Real estate can be precious in the locker room. Keep the benches clear. Your butt is more precious than someone else's gym bag or your dirty clothes. Get that crap off so we can sit down and change.
7. Loud Mexicans [Ed.: "Latinos"]. We love our Mexican ["Latino"] servants in California. Without them, many of our citizens – especially the Jewish ones – would not survive. [Ed.: The author is Jewish so we give him license.] Are there any white people left that know how to change a tire? (Don’t bother answering that.) Even so, when we go to the gym the locker room should be a sanctuary. Pleasant lighting, music, etc. should be the rule. So when the din of shouted, peasant inflected Mexican pierces the silence it raises one’s blood pressure. Can’t the banter about how many tall boy cans of Tecate you intend to drink wait until after we are safely in our German sedans on the way home? Please, shut up already. Put your head down and clean up the towels. Outside the gym you can act like our equals. Inside the gym, you work for us. Maybe one day, we will work for you. (Ahem.) In the meantime, pipe down. - 8. Distracted flunkies reading membership card. We understand you did not finish at the top of your Yale Law School class if you are checking gym cards at the door. Still, please pay attention! Do not waste 30 seconds of our life while you check your text messages or talk to your co-flunkee co-worker. Is it a power thing?
- 9. Leaving plates on the bars. This complaint is as old as gyms themselves. Take your plates off the equipment. There are exceptions, such as 45 lb. plates on the leg press. Otherwise, make no assumptions about the next guy's strength (or lack thereof). Get the weights off.
- 10. TVs everywhere. Friends, the time has come to pull all these LCD screen off of every surface in our environment. They no longer signify wealth. They signify emotional poverty. They fill our eyes almost the entire day. Believe it or not, we do not want to hear Jim Kramer on CNBC shouting at the end of the day. Spare us the TVs for an hour or so. We do not want to see or hear them at the gym.
Honorable mention: It is rare but more and more common. That is using a hair blowdryer in, around or under private areas.
What are your thoughts? Can you think of anything that should have made the list?