"Need a personal trainer?"

This was the question posed to me (and assumedly every other driver-by who perchanced to glance) last week, emblazoned as it was on the rear window of an earlier-model Hyundai. Not for this sticker the modesty and obscurity of bad formatting; this quad-word inquiry was brashly orange, unashamedly italicised, even outlandishly outlined by the kind of EXCLAMATORY black one associates with the Important To Know. It intrigued me for a number of reasons, (I thought it noteworthy at least, in-tracks stopping at best) for its blatant lack of follow-through. No contact name underneath, no business attached, no number provided; just an invasive, unsettling, presumptuous, and abrupt question.

Now now, yes yes, of course and naturally, I am not so misguided nor such an ignoramus to miss the wood for the trees here. The probable answer behind the Mystery of the Aimless Sticker lies in a small business venture that sought commercial cachet by vehicular vaunting, a venture and/or a vehicle that has since ceased trading, transferred owners, or changed numbers. So yes yes, now now, of course and naturally, I understand (with all the sympathy that gentle smiling and head-nodding can convey) that there is most probably an innocent explanation to the Curious Incident of the Sticker at Day Time (apologies to Mark Haddon).

But no amount of ‘trying to walk in its shoes and understand its point of view’ can disabuse, unburden, or jolt me out of that enduring sense of Thoreau-like ‘quiet desperation’. Having so brazenly raised the question, “Need a personal trainer?” and failed to deliver on context or follow-up, I am left panicked and self-doubting. ‘Do I? What can they see that I cannot? Have I so long ignored my training regimen that I’ve become ‘personally’ flabby? I must find out whether there’s substance to this question. I am now desperate to know whether it’s really true’. Notice the key word ‘whether’ here. Where previously there had been neither hint of insecurity nor shadow of self-consciousness, there now intrudes into view an ugly possibility, an insidious germ of an idea, which is ready to sprout Unattractiveness of such magnitude that it will be (to anyone with eyes to see) indubitable evidence of no commitment to ‘personal training’.

In this way, this sticker was the adhesive equivalent of a politician standing before parliament and positing, ‘Does the Member for Coonawarra need deodorant?’, and then sitting down. By virtue of asking, he has done a terrible thing: he has made the inquiry an accusation, and so infused the seemingly redundant with an assumption so potent that it will take all manner of defending and justifying and rationalising to erase the question’s memory.

And this is to say nothing of the unassailable ambiguity of the ‘personal training’ in question. What part/s of my ‘person’ need be ‘trained’? If an English-reading driver unaccustomed to our colloquial use of the term was passing by said sticker, what would they think? Must it always have to do with fitness? With sculpting and toning? Need it concern only that oddly intimate trainee-trainer relationship, which is at once deeply satisfying and yet fraught with two parts gratefulness, one part disdain? One could be forgiven for hearing the question come, 'Need (inter)personal training/need a life coach/need a personal hygiene trainer/need a trainer who can deal with the unmentionables and the undesirables of your life?'

I may be thus thought variously harsh, overwrought, or paranoid. Granted.