Weighty Matters

From an unnamed production office for an undisclosed television show in an address-withheld building in LA where the elevators are shockingly slow...

Around noon today, a shirtless man appeared in the courtyard below my window, walking around carrying a giant barbell with enormous weights toward my office building.  But he was in no rush, it seemed, to get this barbell to wherever it could reasonably have been going, and he stopped for some moments in the middle of the courtyard, lifted the weight, and- as you can see if you give this picture a good squint- stood with his foot on top of the barbell as a conquering hero might stand with his foot proudly on a rock of some sort if he had just successfully killed off a bunch of native people in an effort to make some land or another his own.  Now, there is a gym inside this building, though I have to believe that they have nothing like a BYOW(eights) policy, and if this guy did somehow really need to get this particular weight to the gym here, I can only imagine- as someone who personally could not lift or carry this weight and who looks down on public half-nudity- that dollies have been invented (yes- just checked- they have) as have shirts (a check on this also came back yes).  In short, it was ridiculous.


However, it seems that a coworker of mine may be trying to protect this stupid courtyard body builder by distracting me with something that I dare say is even more inane.  The floor in the studio where we tape our show was recently painted, and- after I saw the body builder- a few of us were putting out seats for our audience.  I was in charge of the taking the chairs down from the big chair stack part of the assembly line; I take down the chairs, someone else moves them to the carpet part of the floor (so that they don't make noise during the actual taping).  My coworker pointed out the newly painted floor to me, and told me to, "Be careful."  You know, with the floor.  I couldn't imagine what I might do that would be un-careful with the floor so just carried on... Until he made himself plain and asked me to please stop putting chairs down on it because we didn't want anything to go wrong.  He asked me to not put chairs on the ground because something bad might happen.  Something bad like... Gravity?  Instead he asked me to carry them over to the carpet, the sweet sweet safe carpet.  Next time I'm borrowing the barbell from the courtyard guy.