Time again to buy exercise machines (Jan. 2)
By Chuck Doud
The Madera Tribune
While driving to work recently, I happened to pass a pickup carrying one of those exercise machines that allows you to pull or lift weights, push levers and generally make yourself miserable.
“Ah ha,” I thought. “It must be New Year’s.”
It is around New Year’s that people decide to do something about how they look and feel. They are tired of being flabby. They are sick of not being able to see their shoes unless they slip them off and take a couple of steps backward. They don’t like having to gasp and wheeze when they file their toenails.
So, instead of enrolling at the local gym and putting themselves in the hands of a trainer, they go out and buy these big, expensive, hard-to-use torture devices.
Most of those who make such purchases are men. I have never seen a woman hauling one home. I do see women demonstrating them in magazine ads and television commercials, but these are women who need an exercise machine like I need a tricycle. They already are buff. They definitely are tough — tough enough to demonstrate one of those machines and not even break a sweat.
The men who demonstrate the machines in these ads are buff and tough, too, and they don’t need them, either.
But the couch potatoes who watch these demonstrations think, “Ah … all I need to do is buy one of these machines, and I will look like that guy.”
So, they go buy a new one or a used one. Somebody helps them muscle it into the back of the pickup, which makes the buyer think, “Hmmm … this thing is heavier than I thought.”
When he gets it home, his wife takes one look at it and says, “Where do you think you’re going to put that?” He realizes he hadn’t thought about that, so it winds up in the garage.
A few weeks later, his wife is using it as a place to stack laundry, and will do so until next New Year’s, when a buyer can be found for it.
