This is a story about Gold’s Gym.

As most of you know I just moved to Boston.  One of my goals is to get super-fit while I’m working here and that means joining a gym.

Today I drive to Gold’s Gym.  It’s a 15 minute drive.  I get out of the car and I have credit card in hand.  I am ready to pay.  This means that I’m pretty much their dream customer — I was locked, loaded and ready to rumble.  Does it get any better than that?

I walk in and say “I want to buy a membership.”  I’m literally pointing my credit card at the swiper.  I’m serious about this, man.

The woman at the register gets the deer-in-the-headlights look and says “I can’t do that.  The membership director isn’t here.”

My thought process at this point is already thinking up one-liners having to do with bureaucrats and whatnot, but I hold back. 

Then I offer to pay for a one-time visit. 

“No, you can’t do that.  You have to wait until tomorrow.”

WHAT?  I had MY CREDIT CARD IN MY HAND. 

If my business is ever operated like this — turning away ready-and-willing customers because some person isn’t there to let them in — I will literally shoot myself in the foot, because that’s what this was. 

OK, I’m finished now.

I’m sitting in the San Francisco airport, about to ship out to Las Vegas (no, sorry, I won’t be partaking in any threesomes as the billboards in SF advertise) and then back to Boston — on my return from the Future of Web Apps summit.

Some quick notes:

• Noah Kagan is awesome and connected me with lots of great people — he’s got a few great gigs coming up and they’re going to rock.  We’ve been communicating long distance for 5 months now and we finally met in person. 
  
• The guys at ACS / Crazy Egg / Postbubble / Pronet Advertising know their stuff and are great people (Hiten, Cameron, Aneil) — introducing me around, showing me what’s in the pipeline, and letting me crash at their place
• The guys at Event Robot are definitely going to succeed, and succeed excellently (is that a word?)
• There need to be more women in this industry (assuming that this is representative of the Web industry, which is most surely flawed logic) — or at least more women speaking at things like this (and definitely more in the audience)
• Learned some good tidbits, but the value was actually seeing / meeting the people I read and read about everyday.  That’s valuable in and of itself.

Off to VEGAS, then Boston. 

I want to publicly thank Noah, Hiten, Aneil, Cameron, Geoff, Mitch and Tim for showing me the CA essentials that are In-N-Out, Jamba Juice and La Taquerita (the best burrito in SF).

(PS — SB’s girlfriend will forever be an A+).

Made the 9ish hour drive to Philadelphia today, which marks more or less the midpoint to Boston.  It’s my grandfather’s 70th birthday and we closed the night out with Trivial Pursuit.  Yeah, the Hurff family gets a little crazy on the weekends!

I’m leaving for Boston Tuesday. 

Let the ride begin.