Pick-A-Day

October 2012
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At my gym there’s a guy who never shuts up. And it’s annoying.

Actually there are a couple guys at my gym who seem to have the need to constantly talk.

Usually I can easily ignore the Chatterbox-Chucks (and, surprisingly, it’s usually the men who are constantly gossiping) because, although they’re talking, they moving from machine to machine and not hogging any single machine.

That and when I work out, I listen to music—earphones in the ear, music turned up just enough to drown out the radio that the gym plays over its loudspeaker system. I usually listen to the same set of tracks, and, when I’m doing cardio, it’s something with a beat, lest I forget to keep moving my feet (and trust me, the beat matters, otherwise I forget where I am and I slow down to a halt).

That said, there are two stand-out chatterboxes at my gym, who I find fascinating and immensely irritating, respectively.

The fascinating chatterbox is a slightly older gay guy who seems to be in shape – and he seems to know everybody, and he talks to virtually all of them, sometimes sitting on a machine and talking to them for 10 minutes. I know the amount of time because I’ve sometimes done two or three machines in the amount of time it takes him to finish a conversation. It’s this machine-hogging aspect that makes me notice him. To make matters worse, he’s a smoker, and he takes (frequent) smoking breaks, during his workout, picking up an espresso to drink at the same time.

Fortunately I’ve only been stuck in the steam-room sauna with him one time – he’s the kind of guy who reeks of cigarette smoke, and in the steam room, it came pouring out of his skin, causing me to leave the room lest I suffer from second-hand-skin-pore-cigarette smoke.

It’s the other chatterbox, quite frankly, that I notice in the steam-room sauna because this man seems incapable of shutting-the-fuck-up.

The steam room is not, as you can imagine, all that large, plus it’s tiled, so it is somewhat of an echo chamber, and this guy loves the sound of his own voice.

Today I was sitting in the steam room, after having done a fair amount of cardio, minding my own business, when another guy came in – I said hello, and went back to minding my own business – he sat about as far away from me as one could.

Ten minutes later, in came Chatterbox-Chuck with a “friend”—there’d been an impending sense of doom since we could hear them talking outside the steam room, but we hoped they wouldn’t come in – notice the “we” here – I know what the other guy was thinking because as soon as Chatterbox-Chuck came into the steam-room, with his friend, they kept talking, and we left.

I need to come up with something sharp and witty to say to this particular Chatterbox-Chuck.

Right now, I’ve only got “Ich wette 10€, dass du kannst nicht sitzen für 10 Minuten ohne sprechen.”*

Any other suggestions?

*”I bet 10€ that you cannot sit for 10 minutes without talking.”

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