Gym Story Saturday

oh boy have i got one for this week!

I walked into the gym one rainy day and was greeted with this lovely display over the power racks. the building's rain drainage pipe runs had a crack in it, so water was running into the gym from the ceiling (my gym is in the basement of an office building)

okay, shit happens. whatever.

but if you look closer at the pic, you'll see two things:

  1. water is dripping on to the tarp above the left rack, and
  2. there's a power cable running into the bin with the hose (they had a little pump in there to keep it from overflowing. cool.)

but then water started dripping off the other side of the (sloppily-set-up) tarp and pooling on the floor, and it pooled right under the extension cable they were using to power the pump.

i told gym staff they should probably plug that into another outlet so that they haven't got power cables just sitting in water on the floor (where people were still able to walk by), so what does the manager do? picks up and moves the coil of cables without unplugging it first.

well, luckily she didn't get fried. cool.

but here's the best part: building maintenance staff showed up later to do a slightly better job with the leak and... well...

  1. one guy was standing on the very top part of a ladder (past the rungs) in his wet shoes with nothing to hold on to

  2. the other guy climbed up on top of the rack and was holding on to the drenched and dripping light fixture for balance with the light still on

  3. one of them argued with me that the power extension cable was water tight so it didnt matter if it was sitting in a pool of water (it was a thin twisted cable; friction wear is real bruh, no reason to be unsafe especially in a high traffic area)

if you're wondering why i didn't just ignore all this shit and mind my own business: i'm a licensed engineer and i have a legal duty to act in the public interest. well that, and i think a decent person should be concerned over shit like this. so after pointing out the unsafe shit they were doing around live power, i felt i had fulfilled my obligations and just continued to watch from afar with morbid anticipation. gym's manager was just as fed up as i was with the maintenance guys and told me if one of them got killed on the job, i was her witness that we'd warned them.

luckily i'd just done legs the previous day, so no gains were lost, but i gotta do em again today and there's only one other rack... hopefully they've fixed this shit up by now.

/r/Fitness Thread