It is a truth universally acknowledged that getting dressed is best on a dry floor.
This applies more to health clubs and gyms than it would in your home. I know this because I undertook a quantitative research study to confirm this important market dynamic. My only respondent was my wife – but I know from experience that if we agree then that is enough evidence to confirm the truth of any subject.
In any case, as anyone in marketing and communications knows, statistics exist to be manipulated to one’s advantage.
For example, I claim to visit my gym three times a week. I go once mid-week and once at week-ends but if the weekday visits are on say, Wednesdays, then that adds up to three visits in eight days, which is not much more than a week is it?
That’s the story I tell my doctor and I’m sticking to it. Such is the nature of statistics.
Anyway, I am seeking to overcome the following dilemma in health clubs and gyms.
On leaving the shower, it is impossible to dry one’s feet. Yes, one can attempt to do so have exited one’s shower but then walking the aisle back to the changing room only makes them wet again – for the showers are still furiously spewing out water after one has left them because they only turn off on an automatic basis.
This means, inevitably, that the floors of the changing rooms get wet because one has to walk through the shower area to get back into the changing room.
So, having returned to the wet-floored changing room to get dressed, one is required to put Foot One into one’s sock and then balance, and perhaps even hop about, on Foot Two so that Foot One (with the sock) can dangle in the air to avoid touching the wet floor before putting it into Foot One’s shoe. Please believe me when I say that one can feel slightly ridiculous performing this ungracious, arrhythmic dance.
The alternative is disaster. For nothing can be quite so uncomfortable than slipping a wet sock into a dry shoe. Or you could even slip over altogether. Health and safety!
Now, I think I have a radically innovative solution to this important problem.
In my health club – and further extensive research has shown that mine is not the only health club to carry this feature – there is a hand drier in the lavatorial area. You know, one of those machines that blows out hot air when you put your hands beneath them. Recently, I have read that these hand drying machines spread more bugs than not using them at all. I hope this does not apply to the showers that appear to carry the same auto on-off technology.
So what is my solution?
Well, surely the automatic hand dryer machines are wasted in their current position? After all, one picks up one’s own towel as one enters the changing room. A towel is essential to the gymming and swimming process.
Why do you need hand dryers in the lavatorial areas?
Wouldn’t these machines, rather than be fixed four feet from the floor in the lavatories be better placed one foot from the floor on the exit from the showers?
This way, one could blow-dry one’s feet under said machines, and perhaps even perform a dainty little samba, before entering the beautifully dry changing-room to get dressed without having to overcome the hateful wet-sock-dry-shoe syndrome?
I appreciate, especially on Guy Fawkes Day, that this little Insight won’t set the world on fire. But it might provide just a few people with a small degree of comfort.
