Clearly this is new to me.

A few weeks ago I joined a gym, at the behest of my lovely. Get in shape for the wedding, that sort of thing. Now, at the particular gym I joined, all new members are signed up for a free session with a personal trainer. The idea is, you get a taste of what it's like, and then they sit you down for the sales pitch. So, when I scheduled a time to come in, they gave me homework: they needed to know what three goals I had for working out and they needed a list of ten foods I had eaten in the past few days. I go to the gym, homework in hand, and meet the guy who is going to personally train me. There are two things I noticed about him immediately. First, when we shake hands, he goes for the "I WILL CRUSH YOUR EXISTENCE!!!" handshake, while I go for the traditional "I am a normal human being" handshake. The second thing I notice is his hair. Now, here is a fellow whose entire personality is concentrated in his handshake and haircut. He has the short, spiky, highlighted tips hair with the wave up in the front. Here's how our first conversation went, for the most part:

"Okay, what are your goals?"
"Well, I'd like to lose 10-15 pounds, tone up in the mid-section area and build up muscle in the shoulder/arm/back area."
"Okay, and about how many calories do you eat in a day?"
"Oh, uh, well, for each item I eat, I keep track of the calories, but I don't really know what it adds up to at the end of the day."
"Oh, okay, well, how many calories is each thing you eat?"
"Typically about 100-200 calories, and I eat 2-3 meals a day."
"Wait, wait - so you're only eating 300-600 calories a day?"
"What? No - that's each ITEM I eat...I eat more than 300 calories a day."
"Oh, okay."
At this point I'll skip forward, to where he's telling me the same thing about 3 different ways.
"It's good that you've lost so much weight so far, but now you want to build muscle, because you don't want to burn muscle away, do you understand?"
"Yes."
And then he kept saying the same sentence over a few times, but this time, instead of saying, "do you understand?" he'd say, "right?" or my favorite "do you agree?" Why would I disagree with that? Basically he's a terrible salesman and he's making up for the fact that he doesn't know a whole lot about what he's talking about by reiterating the one thing he does know over and over again. Anyways, at this point he takes me over to the treadmill, gets me going on that for a warm-up, and says he'll be back in about 5 minutes.

5 minutes later, he returns with a girl in tow. "This is Abbey, she's going to do your session today, and after that we'll talk about how it went."

Abbey asks me if I've ever done this before, and I say that, no, this is something I have never done before. So we start with a quick balance check, which I'm not very good at because I suck. Now, since I've never had anything to do with a personal trainer, the only point of reference I have as to what the dynamic is is, of course "The Simpsons," which tends to be my default point of reference for anything I have no experience with. So, that means my idea of what a personal trainer is is someone who tells you what exercise I'm going to do, and then yell catch phrases at me while I'm doing them. I generally regard them to be outgoing and, well...not stiff. So instead of someone going, "Alright, three more!" or "Keep going, don't stop!" I got something more along the lines of, "That wasn't good. Do it again." or "You're not lunging far enough." The way she acted towards me led me to believe that I had consistently cut her off in traffic for a week straight, or that I had raped her. Which is not true in either case, because those both seem like the sort of thing someone would remember. The other thing I remember her doing was, when we'd finish an exercise, she would just go, "Come on." and then just walk away. I'm in the middle of recovering from my last lunge, which means I have to concentrate all my energy on two things: a) lifting my legs and standing upright, and b) not soiling myself; this woman just leaves.

She also lied to me. Well, she didn't lie to me, she just didn't tell me the whole truth. There I was, laying on an inclined bench, feet in the air, ready to do sit-ups. She informs me that, while I am doing sit-ups, she will be lobbing a basketball at me, and I'm to catch the ball on my way down, and without letting my back hit the bench, throw the ball back to her on my way up again. However, she neglected to tell me that the ball weighed 15 pounds. I had to learn that one the hard way. This bit of information would have prevented me from uttering, "Aw, fuck!" when I just about fall off the damn bench.

As we finish the workout, the girl tells me I did a pretty good job for a first time. This is encouraging. Then she brings me over to the first guy, Mr. Personality, for the sales pitch. Now, at this point, the best way to describe my demeanor is semi-conscious. So, this makes it easier on someone who has no abilities as a salesperson. Now, I've already decided I don't really want to pay for this service, so ultimately my answer will be no. But I've got to sit through it. Now, during the first part, I mentioned the wedding as a motivation to get in shape, and that the Lady is already a member, so he uses that angle. Basically we could pay for 5 sessions a week, and the two of us can split them. I said that that sounds alright, but I would have to talk to her about it to see if we could afford it. He says that if I sign up today, I won't have to pay the $100 service fee (there's always a service fee). I said that I understand all that, but it's still a lot of money, and we're paying for a lot of the wedding ourselves. This is the gist of our final exchange, before we say good day.


"Well, if you sign up today, I don't think she'll be upset, do you?"
"Hahahahaha......oh, uh, listen, I have to talk to my fiancee about this, alright? I'm not prepared to make a decision today."

Laughing at someone usually forces someone to back off a little. This is something I've learned in life.