How hard is this? Really?

When you leave a gym … you put away whatever it was you had been using.

I take advantage, in a modest, old-person way, a community gym in our apartment complex. It’s fairly well-equipped.

Two treadmills, an elliptical, a couple of benches that fold up to nearly a 90-degree angle from the horizontal. A bench-press machine, free weights from 2kg to 25kg, one of those machines with attachable handles that let you haul weights with your arms, a sit-up bench, a big ball, four weighted balls for tossing, three bars for bearing free weights and three small mats. A dispenser of disinfecting wipes.

And a TV.

Not bad, that is, for a building this size.

But to enter it is, usually, to find scenes of chaos.

Free weights scattered everywhere. Heavy weights racked high and light weights racked low. Weights not racked at all. Stuff left close enough to the door to trip people.

Benches left in upright positions. Machines not wiped down. Benches with greasy/wet smears where sweaty heads were placed.

How hard is it to 1) put things back the way you found them and 2) wipe down equipment after you use it — at least in places you had your sweaty hands or head?

I am not a neat freak, and I have the unmade bed and chaotic closet to prove it.

But it makes me crazy to open the door to the gym and see another tableau of chaos. Of a common room left uncommonly messy. Like, be part of a community and pick up after yourself. Your mother does not live here.