Bitch session

I know I have bitched about my gym many times but here we go again.  Do weight trees need to be have instruction manuals posted by them?  Weight trees are just what they sound like.  The branches of the “tree” hold weight plates.  The arms of the tree are spaced appropriately.  The big 45 plates are supposed to go on the bottom, the 25’s and 10’s go on the middle row and the top is normally used for light 2.5 or 5 pound plates.  To use a weight tree you simply take weight from the proper row and when you are finished, put it back there. 

Well evidently the majority of the people at the gym are either too stupid or too f’ing lazy to follow this simple as dirt concept.  They just throw plates on wherever they feel like, leaving others to sort out their mess.  Say I need a 10 pound plate, but on the arm where 10 pounders are there are 5’s and 25’s jammed in front of it.  So now I have to remove all the plates that don’t belong and put them back in their proper spot if it all possible.  Sometimes the tree is such a mess that I would have to remove almost every weight to fix it.  However the most annoying and most ignorant move of all is when an asshole takes a big 45 pound plate and sticks it on the top arm.  When a genius performs this maneuver he manages to also block the middle arm as well since the top arm is not spaced to accommodate a plate of such large diameter.  I mean I just wonder what thought process goes through people’s minds.  It is so damn simple.  Grrr.  It doesn’t help that the gym is managed by the most apathetic cast of people I have ever seen.  All it would take is for them to get off their asses for 15 minutes, twice a day and go around straighten the shit out and put stuff away.  I just wish I had another alternative.

Ok bitch session number two. RCI.  RCI is the points provider that you deal with when you are using your timeshare points at different places other than your home resort.  It in a word is a ripoff.  When you sign on for a timeshare, you pay a good chunk of money up front to pay for “your” unit at your home location, several thousand dollars at least.  On top of that, you have to pay annual maintenance on the unit which runs a few hundred a year.  I really pity those who financed their timeshare as they are getting hammered every single month.  Ok, so you have those expenses up front, which are very large.  The pitch is, but your vacations for the rest of your life are paid for…. BULLSHIT!

On top of the annual maintenance you pay to the timeshare which would cover 3 or 4 nights stay at a hotel, you have to pay an annual fee to RCI, the points company of 100 bucks, another night or two in a hotel.  Then when you go to use your points somewhere else, they doink you again.  The rental costs a certain amount of points PLUS a fee for RCI to do the reservation, even though you already dropped them 100 bucks each year for the privilege of being in the fun club.  The amount you pay depends on the amounts of nights you are staying.  If you are staying 1-2 nights, 49 bucks, 3-4 nights $79 and if it is 5 or more nights $99 dollars.  Then finally there is yet another nice fee you get socked with at many resorts, a cleaning fee which is normally at least 30 dollars.  So if we want to do a quick extended weekend, we are going to pay a tidy 109 bucks for it.  Sure it is cheaper than staying at a hotel but what the hell did I drop all this money up front for? If you do the math, unless you have the ability to take a month of vacation a year, it will take a long ass time till you just get back to a break even point.  If I had it to do over again knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t do it.