Most folks need serenity and positive reinforcement to go about their workout, to release the stress pent up during the day.
For the prodominantly liberal people in Columbia, Md., Fox News represents the polar opposite of those things, a 24-hour station of rage bait and odiousness.
When 49-year-old Ann Geddes sees it, even on mute, during her time in the gym -- well, it just ruins the whole experience for her, according to the Baltimore Sun. In fact, it makes her want to run home and gorge on butter sandwiches until she's too heavy to leave the house.
All right, maybe not that. But she said that seeing the channel every day does get her blood pressure up, always something to avoid in the gym, and that she would like the TV placed in front of her favorite rowing machine changed from Fox News, even though that specific TV is one of only three of the 40 televisions in the entire complex that are tuned to the network.
Geddes, a Democrat who works for a nonprofit and is a former legislative aide to a Howard County delegate, is fighting this the best way someone availed in politics is able: lots and lots of bickering. So far, however, it's been unsuccessful, either with the gym attendant or the president of the giant homeowners' association.
The director of operations of the gym told the Baltimore Sun that roughly 43,000 people use the gym each year and that Geddes is the first to have complained about this issue. "There is no way that we can stop showing one channel because of one person," the homeowners' group president, Phil Nelson, wrote to her in response.
So it seems, for the time being, Fox News has successfully made life unbearable for at least one liberal, who will either have to watch the TV channel that annoys her so, or find a new rowing machine -- one preferably next to the screen that broadcasts NBC.
