Earlier today, I made the one mile walk over to the gym. I had planned on doing a tempo run and following it up with and easy 1500yd swim. I swiped my card, but the gate wouldn't open. I went over to the front desk to find out what was wrong. They looked up my information and told me that my membership had expired at the end of May. I had just received an e-mail a couple of days ago stating that my membership expired at the end of June and that I need to fill out a certain form by June 10 if I didn't want to renew my membership. I can't find the original e-mail, but I still have this reminder email:

I'm not sure what about that e-mail would lead me to believe that my membership expires in May. Maybe the "will expire June 30" part.

The hubby and I have long been turned off by our gym (Boston University's FitRec). We use the pool for our winter swim training. They frequently change the open swim times last minute. To add insult to injury, they never post the update anywhere. You find out when you get there and the pool room is dark. We have complained about this on numerous occasions and their response is always, "Well, the updated time is online, so you should have checked our website before coming." We started checking before coming (we literally live five minutes from the gym, so there isn't much time for change) and it didn't help. They don't really update their website at all. We'll even check the website after going to see if the supposed time change was posted and it never is. To help with this problem of frequent time changes, they decided that they would start sending e-mails to whoever was on the mailing list to notify them of time changes. It doesn't help much if you only send the e-mails once a semester, but the changes are weekly.

Another complaint that we had was the lack of open swim hours. Sure, there are times the pool is needed for classes and such, but most of the time it is not being used. They say its because they don't have enough life guards, but I know a lot of students looking for jobs and they always have like 6 lifeguards on duty at any given time. They have two actually watching the swimmers and the others are in the office playing computer games. They rotate out every 15 minutes. Maybe if they spread them out over the day. But I guess there are rules about how long they can work so they don't get tired or bored and stop paying attention, but on a campus of 30,000 students, and in a big city like Boston, I don't think its a matter of not having a big enough pool of people wanting to be lifeguards. I think they don't want to hire any more.

Finally, because of the lack of hours, the few hours they do have are packed. It is hard to get a quality swim workout in when you are sharing a lane with four breaststrokers and you keep getting kicked. And because of the lack of lifeguards, they frequently close down a bunch of the open swim lanes for classes. So instead of 50 people fighting over 10 lanes, now there are 50 people fighting over 6 lanes. It gets ugly fast. We keep using this as leverage when we complain about the lack of open swim time, but they keep saying, "Well, we only need to have five lanes open to hold open swim. We can't help it if there are a lot of people wanting to use those five lanes."

Let me also say that there is another lap pool in the building across the street that is sometimes used for classes or camps, but it frequently goes unused. In FitRec, there is the lap pool, diving well, and a leisure pool. They aren't exactly lacking in other places to hold classes.

I'm not exactly heart broken over the fact that I can't use the gym today. In fact, I'm glad I'm not a member there any more. It may be a brand new, state of the art gym, but they don't have state of the art customer service. We've never had a problem with the student employees. It is entirely the managers who treat us like: "You're just one of thousands of members here, so we really don't care what you want. If you don't, like it here then leave. We'll make money from someone else who wants to workout here." Trust me. The newness of things can only draw people in for so long before they realize they aren't getting much for their money.

Throwback Thursday:
Take notes, Glee. This is how a capella is done.