Diary of an ex-banker: Thinking outside the shower cubicle!
This morning I showered at the gym.
Nothing surprising in that. I’m sure that tens of thousands of people across the UK did exactly the same. The difference is that I didn’t go to the gym to work out or attend a class and then shower. I went to the gym to shower.
I won’t bore you with the details, but first of all Scottish Power condemned my boiler as unsafe and then my immersion heater broke. So I find myself without heating or hot water at home.
If I was still working in investment banking this would be a minor irritation. I would pay for an emergency plumber/electrician to fix it or have a new boiler fitted ASAP if a repair was not possible. And, of course, my former offices were fitted with showers (complimentary towels provided) so a day or two without hot water wouldn’t be too challenging.
Now that my home is also my office though, the loss of hot water is much more acute. It goes without saying that I must get my boiler/immersion heater repaired or fixed. But here’s my dilemma.
I already knew that my boiler was about to expire and have been making arrangements for it to be replaced. The problem is that this won’t happen until the end of the month and my plumber/builder can’t bring the work forward. And I don’t really want to spend several hundred pounds on a repair that only needs to last a few weeks.
So what are my options?
Naturally, I could ask friends, family or neighbours if I could use their shower.
However, whilst I love living in central London, this means that friends and family are at least a few tube stops away and that seems like a bit too far to go for a morning shower. So that leaves my neighbours. But, as I barely know them, the potential social awkwardness is too awful to contemplate. In any event, the occasional shower is one thing. Every day for the next 3 or 4 weeks? I don’t think so.
My next thought was a cheap hotel. But whilst one night might be ok, the cost for a few weeks would be prohibitive.
So, the solution I came up with was to join a local gym just 5 mins walk from my flat on a one-month contract. Remarkably the cost, even in Zone 1, is just £22.99. And the way I see it, for a mere 77p a day, I get to have a hot shower and for free I can use a modern, well-equipped gym (it was recently refurbished) and attend classes. To put that into perspective, for less than the cost of a cappuccino at Pret, I can shower and work out for three days. Obviously, the gym isn’t Virgin standard (I do miss the robes and toiletries!) but for 77p a day I can hardly complain.
In fact, whilst it was the last thing I thought of, joining a gym seems to be a perfectly rational and reasonable response to my predicament. I can’t see too many downsides but if there are I will update you in a later blog.
The most difficult thing is not letting my domestic woes distract me from the task at hand. Hard when your office and home are the same place.
But I’m pleased to report that we’re nearly there finalizing and launching our polling app — Just Six Questions.
We hope to have a Beta version available in a few weeks and are aiming to launch in October.
Originally published at jsixq.com on September 4, 2018.
