I swam every day last week – rather than my usual three times a week – and on Friday I headed to the rec center. It was busy and there are only two lanes for lap swimming. One had two girls in it – one teaching the other to swim – and the other had a woman flailing about as she did her laps. I hopped into her lane and when she got to my end I said hello and asked if I could share the lane. She sighed, dramatically, and said “Fine,” in a way that made it clear that it was not fine.
At this point I would normally ask if the other person wanted to split the very narrow lane or rotate – keeping to the right. Instead, I decided to just try and stay out of her way – which proved to be tricky since she took her half of the lane out of the middle. Did I mention she was flailing about?
Three laps in and the cranky woman and I are at opposite ends of the lane. A girl asks if she can join us and I tell her sure, but that we’ll have to rotate the lane. I swim down, meet up with the cranky woman, and tell her that we’ve got a third joining us – and that we’ll have to rotate.
She responded, “Now that’s too much! It was bad enough when you got in the lane, but she’s just going to have to swim outside the lane,”
I could have argued that I’ve seen 6 people politely share a lane. Or that with the other pool closed, we just have to adapt. Or I could have taken it to the lifeguard.
But, given my aversion to pointless conflict, I told her:
“Fine. I’ll swim outside the lane,”
Then I ducked under the lane marker… and promptly realized that this wasn’t going to work. The pool was just too crowded. I thought for moment, then decided I’d done plenty of swimming that week and needed a break anyway. She won – I got bitched out of the pool.
Fortunately, one of my friends invited me out to dinner and movie. We went and saw “The Woman in Black”. Plenty of “jump out of your seat moments” – and I was apparently channeling my inner little girl. It was a little embarrassing – but a good change of pace from the cranky woman. At least the cranky woman in the movie – okay, the totally evil woman in the movie – had a good reason for being cranky.
The movie was good, though the ending was a little weak, and when my friend dropped me off at my house I was a little uneasy going in. I guess that was the mark of a good scary movie.
Finally, I bought a clock for my bathroom the other day. I was only $4.00 at Target. It occurs to me that if Time is Money, it’s apparently not very much money. I got a whole clock’s worth of time for less than the cost of a chicken nugget meal at McDonalds.