Cliché Gym Characters
The Screecher
This individual (usually male) announces each repetition much in the same way an animal giving birth might sound like, with the final few repetitions of a set mimicking the final moments of delivery. Usually the screeches are most heightened on the last repetition, when the noise is akin to a Macaw giving birth to a porcupine. The screecher is also known to elevate the decibel level of screeching when the gym population is highest, (or when the pretty girl walks by) and scientists currently hypothesize that this may be a mating ritual. Decibel levels are also thought to increase when the screecher thinks they are endangered (someone getting too close to the piece of machinery they are working out at.) Screechers are thought to be relatively harmless creatures if jet airplane ear plugs are worn…Unless eye contact is made during their very last repetition.. If eye contact is made with a screecher during the last repetition, than there is a high probability that you will spontaneously combust much like Mick Valsalva.
The Pigpen or Pepe LePew
This individual goes in to the gym every day doing their best Pig Pen (from Peanut’s) or Pepe LePew impression, stinking up the gym and the equipment with their latest essence. They wear way too much perfume, (or body odor,) and leave a lingering trail of their proprietary stench behind wherever they workout, depleting oxygen levels to dangerously low levels. Long after they have left the gym you can still pick up their scent in noxious waves of cheap cologne, unwashed armpit hair, durpleberry scented suave shampoo, or the worst; the famously pungent trans-fat sweat mixed with perfume/cologne that seems to defy gravity and hang around for hours until it has made an appearance in every olfactory orifice in the gym. These offenders have never met a perfume they didn’t like (Pepe LePew) or a shower or washing machine they liked (Pig Pen) and the result is a wish that we would have brought a clothes pin to put over our nose when working out alongside the stinker.
The Wi-Fi Guy
Every week the question is re-asked in a desperate plea; “You guy’s have the Wi-Fi password.”?
It’s the Wi-Fi Guy.
No will always be the answer, yet the question persists, getting more desperate with each passing week. If only Starbucks had a gym attached, this individual would never leave home. As the Wi-Fi Guy rides the recumbent bike the wheels are spinning and he is exercising, but the true workout is going on in his mind-for his brain is spinning even faster in a sheer panic for access to the internet. During a typical workout, the Wi-Fi guy won’t let more than three seconds elapse without frantically re-searching the gym heavens for a source of Wi-Fi. Though usually a workout for the Wi-Fi guy workout will be intense-owing to the reason it was fueled by anger from lack of internet access, the workout as a whole will be deemed an abysmal failure…for he could not update his status. The Wi-Fi Guy’s cool down will involve the comment box.
Now some may wonder how an individual cannot go more than a half hour without some form of electronic gadgetry attached to their egg head, but that is a question best left for medical experts, or people that play them on television. For now, I will slip on my Dr. Phil hat and hypothesize that an unhealthy allegiance exists towards electronic media, and an intervention is needed in the form of running Wi-Fi stained hands through fertile soil, instead of through the durpleberry keyboard, or perhaps a search through the local woods for a view of a songbird, instead of a google search for an image of one.
For now, the comment box would like to CTRL + ALT + DEL all Wi-Fi related comments for good.
By Nick Geschke
