The weekends were usually pretty chill at The Gym. Not a lot happened after the morning spin and yoga classes. If the weather was cold enough, I'd walk up to the Whole Foods and buy my groceries for the week and leave them outside, sometimes shoved into the snow to keep everything cool.
Alex, the membership consultant, and I watched videos on YouTube—pre Netflix—or we'd scroll through the member database, comparing our crushes. Sometimes, even the trainers got in on the game and eventually we devised a little code word whenever a woman we liked came in: "Hey Pedro, the leg press is broken."
We'd roll up towels, wrap them in duct tape, and play catch. Weekends were boring.
So when a man dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and cargo shorts stormed in with a clipboard and a lanyard dangling from his neck, saying he was the health inspector, we shrugged and sent him upstairs. To play it safe, I called Kent to tell him the health inspector was here. He also shrugged it off and said, "Put his report in my mailbox."
We continued typing in names like, "Balls, Harold" for our personal amusement, rolling in laughter when there were actually people in the system that matched our names. Ten minutes turned into a half hour, a half hour became an hour. Alex went out for lunch and returned. More time went by before it suddenly dawned on us that the health inspector had been upstairs for two hours.
Perfectly timed, the health inspector came storming downstairs and hurled his clipboard at me, screaming, "I'M COMING BACK TO SHUT THIS PLACE DOWN!"
We grabbed the telephone and called Kent. We started reading the report and realized something was off. The report was dated "10/15/71" and listed the number of pubic hairs counted on both urinals. There was a rough sketch of the dried urine at the floor of the urinals (men's bathrooms are nasty). There was even a note that the sanitary trash cans in the women's bathroom needed to be emptied. He'd been in the women's locker room ...
Kent made a few calls and discovered that the man was a former health inspector who had been fired, had a mental breakdown, and was using his old ID to perform fake inspection reports.