sorry jim, i didn't mean to piss you off.

‘jim’, my personal trainer is mad at me, and you know what that means, more sit up-lunge-hammer-curl-things. i didn’t mean to offend him, what kind of retarded idiot do you think i am?

it was his birthday and i really thought about it. i mean, what do you get a guy who races sharks to robben island before breakfast, and does the iron man for laughs? in the end i got him a tally counter. it was actually an incredibly tricky thing to find. first i had to figure out what it was called before i could google it. i tried googling, ‘little-machine-that-you-hold-in-your-hand-and-press-the-clicky-button-on-the-top-of-it-every-time-you-want-to-count-something-it’s-what-stewardesses-use-on-an-aeroplane-sometimes-to-count-passengers-before-take-off.’ but all that google search kicked back was 7659 pictures of paris hilton and her clean shaven beaver.

i thought one of these thingamabobs was a great idea for a gift for jim (the tally counter, not paris hilton’s bare beaver) you see sometimes when we’re exercising i’ve come to notice the odd discrepancy between my and jim’s counting.

for example i’ll be doing squats and i’ll be counting them off in my head between the stabbing chest pains…106…107…108…109… and as i get to 110 silently in my head, jim will resume his counting out loud… 99… 100…101… now i’ve learnt the hard way that pointing it out isn’t a great idea, and will only get you more lunge-squat-lifts, and anyway by this stage in our session i need all my breathe and energy just to stay alive.

so that’s why i thought to buy him a tally counter. so we could carry on chatting casually while i exercised, and he wouldn’t have to concentrate on the counting because the little machine would do it for him.

how was i to know personal trainers take great pride in their counting abilities? that’ll teach me, and if it doesn’t the four thousand two hundred and six sit ups should do the job.