Why The Gym?

That's what I was asking this morning while I was trying to get in my upper body workout at the YMCA.  Actually I was asking myself silently in my mind but directing it, along with my best WTF glare, at several guys sitting on the machines.  Not doing anything.  Just sitting...talking....on their cell phone....looking at the birds through the windows....hell, just about anything but actually using the machines.  Oh, I ask to work in and they were at least courteous enough to allow that but...jeeze...I really shouldn't have to ask some asshat to move his butt off of every single machine so that I can do weird things at the gym, like exercise.  Even the free weight area was crowded with guys just milling around and mostly yakking on their phones.  One laid his right by my feet while I was doing curls and I was sorely tempted to have a little oopsey and drop a dumbell on the thing.

This is what confuses me.  Why go to the gym just to socialize?  Seems that it would be a better venue to go to a coffee shop or something.  At least there you don't have to pay for a membership, just buy some crappy overpriced coffee and maybe some pastry with an unpronounceable name.  The point is, at a coffee shop they could sit on their butts and yammer till the cows came home.  They would still have about the same risk of breaking out in a sweat.

At the gym, they are in the way.  Shoo.  Shut yer pie holes.  Bodies under construction.