Respect Authority

Dear Woman From The Gym Yesterday,

I just wanted to extend my most sincere apologies, once again, for wasting four seconds of what was clearly your precious time. You’re right, that treadmill was working, and wasn’t out of order, as the people in front of me in line had said, and so I’m forever sorry that none of us did the level of investigatory work it would have taken to verify this. Thank God you were there, really, to check out the situation and then berate us for our lack of thoroughness. Without you, we would have…well, we would have wasted something like three extra minutes waiting for another treadmill to open up. Oh, the horror.

To be honest, when you approached the line of would-be runners, waiting patiently for our next opportunity to jog indoors on an incredibly beautiful 80-degree day, I thought you might say something like “Excuse me, has anyone made sure that treadmill doesn’t work?” But in retrospect, your approach was much better — quicker, more direct. “Are you using that?” left the room for mystery I wouldn’t have thought of on my own — which one of us is ‘you,’ what exactly is ‘that’ — these are questions I would have never had the ability to wonder about had you not been so phenomenally vague. So, needless to say, when 0.04 seconds after you asked, no one had responded, it was, you’re right, completely necessary to go all Billy Crystal in City Slickers on us. “Helllooooo,” and the waving of the hand in front of our faces, like we were blind, well that was just you being thorough yourself — making sure even the sense-impaired would know you were looking for answers.

It’s true, given the impatience factor, I found myself growing curious about your occupation. “Who is this incredibly busy and important woman?” I wondered to myself. “How is it that I have come to be in her illustrious presence? How fortunate am I to work out at the same New York Sports Club as this goddess?” Thankfully, you were quick to answer my thoughts: “I’m a lawyer, I have to get moving.” Oh. Ohhhhhh. Well, that explains it! Had I known you were a lawyer, such a rare and special career acquired by so few of us in our short and pathetic lives, I would have not only invited you to go ahead and use the open treadmill, why I would have machine-gunned down all of the other runners so you could have your pick of them all. I would have rolled out a hand-woven red carpet for you to run on. I would have dropped to my knees on my dusty yoga mat and bowed down to kiss your Avis-clad feet. Considering my lack of reverence in the presence of such greatness, I’m surprised you didn’t spit on me right there.

“Knock yourself out,” I told you. See, you took that to mean “Go ahead, use the treadmill, I’m in no rush,” which, though also true, wasn’t my intended message. I meant, literally, go fucking knock yourself out. Go walk in traffic. Go jump in front of a subway car. Go get laid off. And by all means, go ahead and use the open treadmill because I think that I might survive if I have to wait another three minutes, I think my lowly existence might endure if I don’t hop on an artificial running machine at this very moment. In fact, I think everyone in this line would rather see your whims met than deal with another second of being berated at 7:30 p.m. on a Monday evening because we’re not giving 123% to the monitoring of 30+ treadmills.

And by the way, when I passed you five minutes later, that looked like a really awesome walk you were having. It’s a true shame you couldn’t do that outdoors.

Sincerely,
Kira

P.S. I’ve attached a photo of a shirt I think you might like, that would probably also cut down on incidents like these in the future. I looked for “I’m a really important laywer that makes more money than you and therefore my time is infinitely more valuable,” but apparently no one’s put that on a T-shirt yet. Go figure.