This meant that she got to handpick her trainer. She dragged her feet for a few weeks but then started getting phone calls from one particular trainer asking her when she was going to sign up. Of course, for me, this would have made my choice slightly easier by paring my options down by one. But Shelbi "liked his initiative." So she signed up with "Brad." The next time she was at the gym she dropped Elliott off at the Kids Club and was talking with one of the employees there who we know. She mentioned that Brad was going to be her trainer and the employee's immediate response was "Oh, is that the new bulky guy who looks like he has Down Syndrome?" 

Poor Brad. Indeed she was right. Brad is 19 years old, rather socially awkward and a brand new trainer at our gym. And when he was talking with Shelbi about setting up her first appointment, Shelbi glanced down at his schedule and noticed that his calendar was virtually blank. In fact, she might be his first and only client. And when I heard this my heart sank a little. The first thing I said was, "When you're done with your three sessions, you don't get to drop $600 on 10 more sessions just because you feel bad for Brad." 

I am convinced that if you lined up all of the 24-hour fitness trainers in front of me and handed me brief biographies of each of them, I would have been able to guess that Shelbi would have chosen Brad. "Let's see... Tiny, peppy cute girls... you're out. Douchey guys wearing bronzer... nope. Guy who looks like he might freak out on a client in a Roid Rage incident... probably not. Social outcast with no other clients? Bingo."

As strange as it sounds, I would have nailed this pick because of the experience we had when we were contemplating getting a dog before Einstein came back into our lives. A couple of times a month we could go to the Humane Society website and look at the available dogs for adoption. I would gravitate to the two and three-year old hound dogs and Shelbi thought they were cute as well. But then we would get to an 11-year old lab mutt with one eye whose picture looked like he should be either playing a song in a minor key on the violin for handouts or holding a gun to his head. And Shelbi would melt. She would track down the most pathetic looking animal of the 300 available at the Humane Society and I would need to physically restrain her from getting into the car at that exact moment to purchase a dog that had a very good chance of passing away during our drive there.

"No one is ever going to adopt that dog! He deserves as much love as the puppies!" Shelbi would reason. And, while that's true, if we followed her dog-selecting patterns, we would go through about four or five dogs every year. We'd be running a dog hospice service. But that's what I love about Shelbi. She has a real heart for the underdog. And it's a good thing that, so far, I've been a voice of reason. Otherwise we would occupy one of the most depressing houses you've ever seen. It'd be like M*A*S*H Animal Edition with injured blue jays, deaf gerbils and tailless cats as far as the eye could see.