samuri.co.uk

Swim
Distance:  1 mile

Picture the scene.

You’re a slightly overweight, not hugely fit gentleman who is stopping in a hotel and who quite fancies a swim. You don your trunks, suck in your tummy (you will need to maintain this pose now for the entire 30 minutes that you’re in public view) and admire your amazing physique in the mirror for a few seconds and then head to the pool. For a hotel pool it’s not bad at all, almost 25 metres (although they claim a full 25 metres), with three wide lanes for swimmers all helpfully marked with directional arrows to make sure you go the right way round. The slow lane has about three fat ladies in all sort of floating there. The middle lane has nobody in it and the fast lane has a skinny bloke caning up and down it at warp speed. Do you…

 a. get in the slow lane (and if truth were to be told, this is your correct speed rating)?
b. Get in the middle lane, you’re not actually fast enough to be in hear but it’s empty so what the hell?
c. Ignore the slow and middle lanes as an afront to you masculinity, jump into the fast lane because you’re a SWIMMING GOD (you’ve had to walk past both these lanes to get to the fast one) and then move your opulent carcass up and down the lane at a speed not insignificantly different from ‘dead fucking halt’. You will futhermore ignore any direction arrows, a skinny bloke cannoning into you because you’re going the WRONG FUCKING WAY, any subsequent suggestions that you’re in the wrong lane or indeed any of the 19 obvious signs that someone is trying to get past you, you fat arrogant twat!!!!?

Answers on a massive pair of calf length trunks please.

After he had got out I had the lane to myself for a while again and then these two muscley young lads came out of the steam room for a swim. They stood at the end surveying the lanes and debating which one they should go in. After much discussion (I only heard it all because I’d stopped for a rest), they decided that they couldn’t be arsed going in the fast lane??? and got into the middle lane where for two apparently fit and strong young men they really did show that they couldn’t be arsed. In long distance mode I was passing one of them every half lap and the other every full lap, and I’d consider myself ‘not that quick to be honest.’ Anyway, I did 2k again, still struggling to get myself to the speed where I can do 3k in an hour and thence two miles.

In other news I was rather incensed, (to put it mildly) to find my first expenses claim has been rejected. The reason? No home to office deduction. So lets get this straight, not only do I have to travel much further than everybody else to get to my permanent place of work (a 90 mile round trip), but then when I work away from home, I get victmized even further by having to remove the costs of travelling this greater distance from my expense claim? Yeah, that’s fair. That’s the most arse about face thing I’ve ever come across. Ranty email time I think, dear me, it’s not the first since I started here.