MHC comes to their senses, Retro flaws, Camaro closer?, roaming
So yesterday as promised I filed a claim with American Express regarding the transaction with the Manhattan Club. I was able to do the entire process online which is nice. I was quite surprised when late morning the phone rang and it was Maritza from the Manhattan Club.
She called to tell me that they were crediting the full amount of the reservation. I was very pleasantly surprised and told her I appreciated her efforts in getting the charges credited.
I then had to go remove my “manhattan club sucks” post tags from yesterdays entry to keep that phrase from skyrocketing up Google search results for the place. I then contacted American Express to tell them that the hotel agreed to credit my card so I could drop the dispute. They said the credit has not posted yet so the best thing to do was just leave the dispute open. It will automatically close as soon as the credit is posted anyway. It felt nice getting a win where someone that was less motivated to fight would have been stuck with 4 bills out of their pocket for absolutely nothing.
Although I am generally happy with my gym, Retro Fitness, there are a few things that do bother me.
The place is not cleaned as regularly or as thoroughly as it should be. Quite often there are dust bunnies roaming around under some machines. Since I spend a lot of time there on my hands doing body weight exercises, I get a real sense of just how dirty the black floor is. It takes no extra money to have employees go around and clean areas of the gym throughout the day.
There are some simple repairs that need to be done that seem to linger on forever like reattaching cleaning solution holders to walls. Oh and bathrooms have no appreciable hot water to speak of. When I took a shower there the other week it didn’t have one shred of warmth even with the handle turned to full hot.
I also think it is silly that Retro has a shake bar that sells high calorie shakes to “refuel” after a workout where you wind up consuming twice the amount of calories that you burned. I never understand why people want to cancel out the benefits of exercise by over indulging afterwards. It’s sort of like the way we address the deficit, half way. Anyway, I am sure the shake bar is just viewed as another profit center for the gym and has little to do with the overall health benefit of the customers.
Evidently some of the warts I saw were also seen by the corporate management at Retro. The guy that was running the gym has been told to get out. I have not seen him in a couple months at this point. Evidently besides my observations there have been issues with missing inventory and complaints of poor treatment of both staff and customers at the place.
I just hope they get the issues sorted out and that it isn’t a warning sign of failure of the gym. Despite the warts it still is leaps and bounds in front of shitty Planet Fitness and that old dirt hole Powerhouse/Pure Fitness that I used to frequent.
So the 2012 Camaros are now in full production. I am hoping once I get back from our trip Ali and I can look at possible road maps and time frames to when I can go and place my order. It seems that we keep having these periodic big expenses (water equipment, tractor) that are making saving money at a good clip difficult. My goal is to have one in my garage or at least ordered before 2011 expires.
I plan to temporarily add an international data roaming plan to my phone for the Ireland trip. I am going to buy 125 meg of data usage, thinking that should be enough to get us through the week. My plan is to use this to make internet access available for anyone in my family by utilizing PDANet to create a on the fly wi-fi hotspot they can connect to. I just need to make sure that people know that they need to abstain from watching YouTube videos or downloading MP3’s while we are overseas. If I go over the 125 meg the charges ring up fast, $10 for every 10 mb over.