A shower! Just a fucking shower!

Why is it so much to ask for bicycle commuting to get a shower?  It makes me think it's about social-conditioning: you shall own a car, you shall get fat, or you shall exercise in only the ways that suck your time and money.  This is not a post on making do without a shower after cycling to work, because it is all a bodge.  No, this is a rant.

It's a rant that I am putting it on both my active blogs, because it is about sport, and the fact that people are fucking stupid.  More so, school principals and sento and gym owners

In three elementary schools in Toronto's suburbs, and three 'international'* elementary schools in Tokyo and its suburbs, I have had exactly ONE where getting cleaned up was not an ordeal.  Another where it was reasonable: no shower in any building, but an unused bathroom with a big sink.  Bit of math for you: six schools minus one with a shower I could use, and one without a shower, leaves how many with showers I could not use?  Two-thirds!  Please tell me why a school is built with a shower for staff - no, two-thirds are - but the principals have ordained showers be used for storage, or put off limits because the principal does not see the need.  And please tell me who made a fucking principal god?  He, or so often she, is just another sycophantic civil-servant looking for a better pay-grade, or the private-industry version of same, not someone any better than the teachers.  More often worse.  Do they get off making decisions that do them little benefit, but inconvenience others greatly?  Well yes, probably.

Reminds me of what I said at a party, in front of my wife and three teachers, when someone who knew no better asked me why I was not interested in becoming a principal:

"Integrity."

The teachers laughed hard, so others asked for an explanation.

If that were the end of it...  For Tokyo I thought, 'fine, but at least I can find a sento or gym that opens early.'  Wrong.  Japanese bathe of evenings (which explains J-men's morning greasiness) so sento do not open of mornings.  Well, how about gyms?  The public ones open past nine, because J-civil-servants follow 'the rules' of a nine o'clock opening for public institutions.  I cannot blame them.  If they came two hours earlier, their boss would still make them work past sunset.  And the private gyms?  Fuck...

Private gyms only exist to rip people off as close to illegal as won't get owners jailed (any country).  First, they expect you to pay and not come.  Second, they expect you to commit to year-long contracts, and charge a one-time 'membership fee', for which I can think of no reasonable explanation - except theft.  Japan, as Japan does, takes it to another level: at Gold's Japan** you have to sign up on their credit card in order to join paying for less than a year up-front, along with the initial 'membership fee'.  I don't need more than one credit card to manage, thanks, and since the JACCS card happens to be from the same corporation as owns rights to 'Gold's' in Japan, you can gag on my unit.  I am not Japanese enough a customer to take that shafting un-lubed.

For my purposes, looks like I have to take the fucking morning cattle-car, run home some evenings, and schlepp clothes back and forth again.  For principals, looks like you have lost any chance I'll do aught for you that isn't only in my best interests, or the kids'.  For gyms, look for takings elsewhere.

*In other words, schools where parents pay for English education from teachers in Japan for just several years, with no job security, thus little investment in the school.  Did I mention the majority of the kids and their parents are not 'international': Japanese?

**The only private gym near where I work...