Faced with a choice between more filing or staying home, I opted for staying home. So I headed off the Y this morning to get a swim in. Usually, if you get there early enough, you'll be able to avoid all the problem swimmers. But not today. For some reason, in just the half an hour that I was swimming, I got them all.

I got:

The Talkers- This is the type of person who spends all their time walking up and down the lane, talking to someone. They're usually either old Russian women holding their coffee klatch or a couple who are so in love, they can't go an entire lap without getting all shmoopy with each other.

The Walker- They're the one's who don't quite understand the point of a lap pool so they spend half their time kicking around with the little kick boards or then doing some sort of funky aerobic walking thing. All of this while totally oblivious to the pool right next to the lap pool purposely set up for that kind of stuff.

The What Are You Doing Guy- Usually this type gets in the middle of your lane and decides it's a great place to do some yoga stretches or contemplate the state of the universe. For some reason they never seem to notice the three or four people at each side of the pool, waiting for them to get out of the way so they can actually do some swimming.

The Doesn't Understand the Point of Lanes Guy- There's two types to this one. Either they get in the wrong lane, like they're really slow and get in the fast lane or really fast and get in the slow lane. Or, they're like some guy today, who got into my already crowded slow lane without checking to see that the other slow lane had no people in it. (I think this guy was a double offender because the purpose of his getting into the lane was so he could talk to his wife in the lane next to ours).

The German- See, when there's more than two in a lane, you have to somehow circle each other. The key to doing this is to always pay attention to the other people in the lane so that you never run into them. Pacing here is key and I find that the best thing to do is to stop at each end, assess what's going on, and maybe wait a bit before diving in because there might be someone who is just a little too close to you.

Usually, however, when it's like this, there's always somebody who just puts their head in the water and swims away. When they get to the wall, they just turn around and swim again, never paying attention to any other people in the lane. As a result, they send everyone else scrambling into other lane's to avoid them or wind up getting hit or kicked by them. They're kind of like in the movies when they show a car going onto a sidewalk and everyone has to dive out of their way.

The reason why I refer to this type as the German is for some reason, half of the people at the Y who do this are German. Go figure.

And for the icing on the cake, today I also had the Encounter with A Friend's Bad Breakup Ex-Girlfriend. This is always stressful because while you still like them, you know things went really bad for the guy afterwards and that they've been cut out of your social circle because of it. In this case, the name is hardly ever mentioned, except in really quiet, hushed whispers. The stress here comes from not saying anything that some people might not want them to know, like "oh, he's doing really well know. I think he's doing a lot less drugs now and he's a lot less freaky." Or "yeah them (referring to a couple that she helped introduce) they had this beautiful wedding in Miami and they're very happily married and living in New York. Didn't see you at the wedding, what happened?"