stickin' it to the man

I figured out over the weekend that my health insurance, which gives me a $20 discount off of my monthly gym membership fee if I go often enough, does not actually require that I work out while I'm at the gym. I just have to show up 8 times a month. In fact, I could use my membership card to get past the main gate, walk directly to the vending machine, buy some Pop Tarts, and leave again, and as long as I bought Pop Tarts eight times a month, HealthPartners would give me a discount for being a "healthy person."

I realized this because on Sunday I was at the gym for exactly four and a half minutes. Saturday, after riding the same 55-mile loop as last week, Nate and I decided to go to the gym just to use the hot tub. It was great. We soaked in it for close to 45 minutes and left warm and relaxed, which is not something our water heater at home can accomplish. So on Sunday, after a two-hour run (that damn half-marathon again), we decided to do it again.

We weren't even in it long enough for my butt-cheeks to stop being cold to the touch when the Queen Bitch of the Lifeguards marched up and barked, "Everybody out! Cleaning the hot tub! Right now!" She may even have clapped her hands at us.

And she stood there and kept barking until everyone in the hot tub had gotten up and left. Nate asked her if this was a regular occurrence, if they cleaned the hot tub every Sunday, and she said in her best I'm-the-only-thing-keeping-this-gym-from-bankruptcy voice, "Well, I do. Every Sunday at four."

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but if you were to clean the hot tub once a week, wouldn't it make more sense to do it, say, Tuesday at 10 AM, when there aren't twelve people using it?

So I went back into the locker room, having been gone approximately three minutes. The same scrawny, dessicated old woman was still parading around naked with shampoo in her hair. I hadn't even been in the hot tub long enough for her to get around to rinsing it.

I was pretty pissed, seeing as I'd gone there just to use the hot tub, and since I'd just run for two hours I didn't really want to swim laps or anything, so in this case it was obviously the Man that stuck it to me and not the other way around. I didn't even buy any Pop Tarts. BUT, I came to the valuable realization that while I wasn't even there five minutes, I still got insurance credit for working out. HealthPartners, I own you. And you can bet your sweet ass that this summer, not one of my eight visits per month will be spent exercising. Take that.

(Judging from the girth of the other people in the hot tub, however, I do not think I was the first person to realize this. I'm just late to the party. Oh well, better late than never.)