I have finally gone back to the gym. Everyone said I was ready and with support and a good trainer to help, I could do this. I agreed and so off I trotted. I like my trainer, she and I have worked together before, she isn’t body perfect and she has had some injuries, she understands.

What does she understand you ask, rightly. She understands if I say I can’t do that I am not being a whiny itchy baby, I am saying my injuries won’t let me do that particular movement. When I say that she modifies the movement and we work through it. That is why I like my trainer. We are working to rebuild me, from the ground up. We are working to rebuild my balance, my strength and my confidence. She isn’t asking me to step on a scale, she isn’t measuring my waist, my ass or my thighs. She gets I feel miserable in the layers of fat I am wearing today and don’t need reminders. She talks to me about food, nutrition and other programs my gym offers and we look for things that might work for me.

I like my trainer. I usually like my gym, but this is a Red Hat, so you know there is something that must have stuck in my craw, something that has me sideways.

I meet my trainer in the morning on the way to work, specifically I work out at 7am. This means I must change at the gym. I must shower and dress at the gym, this already grosses me out. I must use their facilities, their locker room. When you walk into their locker room there is a great big sign, you can’t miss it unless you are blind it:

Obviously not the actual sign, but a close

facsimileDespite this very obvious sign you cannot miss unless you are blind, women are casually carrying on extended conversations on their smart phones. Listening to music on their smart phones. Playing games or something on their smart phones.

Unless I am mistaken, all of these phones have cameras in them. I am fairly certain, I am not mistaken.

What I am most annoyed with is many of these women have walked directly by the locker room attendant with their phones plugged directly into their ears, nothing was said. Then there are the women who are sitting on the benches casually chatting on their phones, carrying on conversations as the attendant walks through the locker room without saying a word.

What the hell? Which one of them can’t read the sign? The member or the attendant, this is the question I want answered.

Yesterday, my patience finally reached a boiling point. Maybe it is me but the locker room at the gym is not a tearoom or a bar, especially first thing in the morning. I don’t want to navigate around body perfects standing in the middle of the aisles discussing last night with each other or the person on the other end of their smart phones. I don’t want to try to dress while other women are sitting on the benches with their phones to their ears carrying on complete conversations. I certainly do not give to tinkers damn, who they did or in what position they did them.

Can I just say…..You are not that important!!

It is unlikely there is anything going on in your life that is so important it cannot wait for the one hour it takes you to work out. Leave your phone in the car. I do.

If you want to work out to music, buy a $49 IPod. Yes, I am well aware your smart phone does everything today. Tough, it isn’t allowed in the locker room and it makes others very uncomfortable. It makes me uncomfortable.

In fact, it makes me so uncomfortable I thought about it all day. I stopped at the gym on my way home and talked to the Operations Manager about it, he wasn’t there yesterday morning. I told him about my experience of the morning, including his own staff not doing anything. He is apparently new to this gym.

He promised to talk to the staff.

He suggested I say something to offenders first. I explained, it isn’t my job to enforce gym rules but that I would be happy to do so politely once. The problem with this is I would be doing so to ¾ of the women in the locker room and I really didn’t have time to police the locker room. It was the job of his staff to prevent members from entering with their smart phones.

I suggested his staff do their jobs at the front end, at the door of the locker room instead and that if I had to do it for them it would only be polite once. We talked about the maliciousness of humans, women in particular. I reminded him of the pictures we have all seen on the Internet from time to time, those terrible pictures we all laugh at of Wal-Mart customers, Fat Girls and others. I asked him where he thought they came from, did he really believe people posed for them.

My next work out is Thursday morning. I will give him an opportunity. If things aren’t better, I will politely say to other members their phones aren’t allowed in the locker room, point them to the sign at the entrance and ask the attendant to deal with it if necessary.

If things aren’t better, next Tuesday I will pack my 35mm film camera (without film) into my gym bag and when I am dressing, I will put that empty camera on the bench next to me. What do you think, might the important ladies of smart phones cadre be a tad discomforted by my camera?