TYOTD part I: The Mess Upstairs

2006: The Year of the Douche
a saga in many parts

2006 was a cleansing year at the gym. Many things we were familiar and comfortable with were swept away by the tide of new management. But, as so often occurs, what followed the tide in was not what the management expected. In order to appreciate the many changes our little world endured in 2006, it is of course necessary to understand the context in which they occurred. So, dear reader, I present to you a primer on how our gym works.

The gym is owned by a married couple who we will call Tweedledee and Tweedledum, or T&T. T&T have have managed to keep the gym profitable for over twenty years, through a unique combination of stupidity, greed, dishonesty, and family money. Like incompetent management everywhere, they exhibit that peculiar combination of hyper-attentiveness to totally irrelevant minutiae, and complete obliviousness to everything important to a functioning business. For example, they are preternaturally obsessed with vacuuming. We hear about the need to vacuum approximately 800,000 times every day. They have paid for multiple vacuums and vacuuming systems, virtually all of which are redundant. Not one, but two, new vacuuming options were presented to us this week alone. Meanwhile, they have absolutely no idea that the men’s locker room has basically degenerated into a brothel (much more on this topic later).

Their idiocy is matched only by their miserliness, which borders on pathological. The old adage “spend money to make money” is completely lost on them. As an old manager here once said, “they’re so cheap, they jump over quarters to collect nickels”. Truer words have never been spoken. Strangely, they do spend money on things that don’t serve any purpose - the 10,000 vacuuming apparatuses we can choose from each day are all actually quite expensive. The rule seems to be not to spend money on anything which helps the business. To illustrate: we have a café in the gym, which produces an annual revenue of approximately nothing. When it was suggested to T&T that the easiest way to put more customers in the seats was to install wireless internet, they dismissed it as absurd and a waste of money. I can only assume that they have never seen one of the businesses which have installed wi-fi and profited from it, which I think by this point includes all of them. Someone must have later told them that wi-fi would lose money, because a year later, they installed it.

T&T’s follies are of endless amusement to all of their underlings, but it is not the affectionate condescension afforded to hapless bunglers. The wage slaves take great pleasure in T&T’s idiocy, because we resent them and want them to fail. After all, they steal our money and we know it. No one here has ever received a pay stub with their check. If you ask for one, you get a post-it note attached to the check with some illegible, and possibly imaginary, numbers scrawled on it. They have never paid overtime to anyone (until very recently - a story soon to follow). No one is exactly sure how much they make per hour, because financial irregularities are the norm here. Everyone has a story they are happy to share about getting ripped off. It's like little Enron over here.

If this place goes under, we will throw a party. We wish for unemployment. Anything is better than being systematically ripped off by people who are already rich and are stupider than lobotomized goats.

Next: Well, why do you guys work there?