On discovering someone else’s underwear in my gym locker.

There’s a small gym where I work — two treadmills, a stationary bike, an ellipse machine, some free weights — and I pop in there a few times a week and grimly endeavor to stave off the ravages of time.*

The gym has a little locker room with two showers and a bank of eight standard-issue gray lockers: tall, thin, with the requisite eye-level shelf. Yesterday, after my ravage-staving-off, I opened my locker and came face-to-crotch-seam with a pair of underwear, and it was not my underwear. I said some bad words and hurled the underwear onto the bench in angry disgust, and then turned back to my locker. Oh, for f***’s sake, the idiot also put his jeans in there, and his shirt, and his…uh…his belt…and, uh…

(Brief pause while my tiny brain does some simple arithmatic).

Oh dear.

This means I now have to walk over to the underwear, sheepishly pick it back up, then carry it back to and replace it in the locker, which of course wasn’t my locker to begin with. I fully expected the owner of said underwear to walk into the dressing room, sitcom style, just at the moment I was standing there with his Hanes briefs pinched between my thumb and forefinger. If that happened I figured I had two basic routes to choose from:

1. Haltingly attempt to explain what had happened while awkwardly returning the underwear to the locker.

2. Say, “Hi!”, then bury my face in the underwear and inhale with great vigor and zest, while staring fixedly at the owner.

Discuss.

 

* Also, I’m very vain and when it’s just me and the full-length mirror I like to do a little shadow boxing and discreet flexing. Although it’s never really just me in there — it’s me and the security guards, watching via the security cameras. I hope I provide at least a little bit of amusement during what must be an otherwise rather drab day.

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