Cameron: Pedometer battle pits me against a dirty dog
Cameron: Pedometer battle pits me against a dirty dog
May 27, 2006
As I explained last week, my next-door neighbor, Tom, started a feud with me in the most underhanded of fashions: He bought me a birthday gift.
The so-called "present" was a pedometer, a little device that sits on your hip and supposedly improves your health by registering how many steps you take in a day, though it doesn't give you any credit for taking a nap. Sleep is very important, too.
Normally, when someone gives me such a thoughtful gift, I wrap it back up and give it to someone else, but in this case I wound up registering with Tom as my "walk buddy" on the walkstyles.com Web site, a place where people can go and see how much more they're walking than Tom.
I'll note that there's no corresponding site where you can visit and compare how many grilled cheese sandwiches you've eaten in a day, or how many beers you've had compared with the national average. These walking people are real hypocrites.
The pedometer can register only 99,999 steps in a 24-hour period, which seemed less than adequate, especially since without any special effort at all I was able, my first day, to run up a score of 612. Tom hit only 490.
"I marched up and down the driveway a few times," I explained when he called.
"You can do that?" he demanded, outraged.
My first week, I beat Tom every day, but I was careful not to gloat. "You're not even a man," I told him. "My little sister walks more than you do."
Things changed the second week: I uploaded a personal best of more than 2,100 steps, then recoiled in horror when I saw that Tom had hit 8,700! I felt personally betrayed: Tom was missing the whole point of this thing, which was that I was supposed to win.
"What are you doing?" I shouted. "You can't walk that much in a day - it's unhealthy!"
"I'm looking at the WalkStyles Web site right now. Your graph looks like it's crawling under a fence," he taunted.
"Walk style - yeah, right. You have no sense of style; your favorite sweatshirt has a purple duck on it," I complained bitterly.
"Yeah, that's another thing: Are you done borrowing that? Because I'd really like it back."
"Sure. I'll walk it back over to you, you ungrateful jerk," I snarled.
"I bought you a pedometer and you call me a jerk and I'm the one who is ungrateful?"
"If the shoe fits, put it on and walk 8,700 steps," I retorted, triumphantly winning the debate.
And that's how it started - a contest fought by feet, a battle for our very soles. I hit 9,200, but Tom recorded 11,600. I put down 12,200, and Tom fired back with 13,900. "This escalation is ridiculous!" I stormed at him.
"I'm winning," he responded irrelevantly.
"You're acting like a child!" I yelled, hanging up on him by banging the phone in its cradle a half-dozen times.
My life became an obsessive quest for pedometer points. When a group in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called to ask if I would speak to its convention, I had only one question: "How many steps would that be from here?" The whole thing was so toxic to my system I began to shed pounds. (I never wanted to lose weight from exercise - I wanted to lose it from ice cream.) My lungs were hurting from all the fresh air, and I started waking up every morning with a loathsome energy that made oversleeping impossible.
Yet despite all this, Tom remained inanely fixated on the competition, beating me nearly every single day. I began to question why I was friends with such a stupid, repugnant, abhorrent, overreacting person.
One day I was doing a few laps around the block before setting off on my first walk of the afternoon when I noticed Tom's dog wandering loose in the neighborhood. And what did I see attached to her collar?
Tom's pedometer.
I've tried to have a reasonable conversation with Tom about this, but he refuses to answer his door.
He says my death threats make him afraid.
May 27, 2006
As I explained last week, my next-door neighbor, Tom, started a feud with me in the most underhanded of fashions: He bought me a birthday gift.
The so-called "present" was a pedometer, a little device that sits on your hip and supposedly improves your health by registering how many steps you take in a day, though it doesn't give you any credit for taking a nap. Sleep is very important, too.
Normally, when someone gives me such a thoughtful gift, I wrap it back up and give it to someone else, but in this case I wound up registering with Tom as my "walk buddy" on the walkstyles.com Web site, a place where people can go and see how much more they're walking than Tom.
I'll note that there's no corresponding site where you can visit and compare how many grilled cheese sandwiches you've eaten in a day, or how many beers you've had compared with the national average. These walking people are real hypocrites.
The pedometer can register only 99,999 steps in a 24-hour period, which seemed less than adequate, especially since without any special effort at all I was able, my first day, to run up a score of 612. Tom hit only 490.
"I marched up and down the driveway a few times," I explained when he called.
"You can do that?" he demanded, outraged.
My first week, I beat Tom every day, but I was careful not to gloat. "You're not even a man," I told him. "My little sister walks more than you do."
Things changed the second week: I uploaded a personal best of more than 2,100 steps, then recoiled in horror when I saw that Tom had hit 8,700! I felt personally betrayed: Tom was missing the whole point of this thing, which was that I was supposed to win.
"What are you doing?" I shouted. "You can't walk that much in a day - it's unhealthy!"
"I'm looking at the WalkStyles Web site right now. Your graph looks like it's crawling under a fence," he taunted.
"Walk style - yeah, right. You have no sense of style; your favorite sweatshirt has a purple duck on it," I complained bitterly.
"Yeah, that's another thing: Are you done borrowing that? Because I'd really like it back."
"Sure. I'll walk it back over to you, you ungrateful jerk," I snarled.
"I bought you a pedometer and you call me a jerk and I'm the one who is ungrateful?"
"If the shoe fits, put it on and walk 8,700 steps," I retorted, triumphantly winning the debate.
And that's how it started - a contest fought by feet, a battle for our very soles. I hit 9,200, but Tom recorded 11,600. I put down 12,200, and Tom fired back with 13,900. "This escalation is ridiculous!" I stormed at him.
"I'm winning," he responded irrelevantly.
"You're acting like a child!" I yelled, hanging up on him by banging the phone in its cradle a half-dozen times.
My life became an obsessive quest for pedometer points. When a group in Winnipeg, Manitoba, called to ask if I would speak to its convention, I had only one question: "How many steps would that be from here?" The whole thing was so toxic to my system I began to shed pounds. (I never wanted to lose weight from exercise - I wanted to lose it from ice cream.) My lungs were hurting from all the fresh air, and I started waking up every morning with a loathsome energy that made oversleeping impossible.
Yet despite all this, Tom remained inanely fixated on the competition, beating me nearly every single day. I began to question why I was friends with such a stupid, repugnant, abhorrent, overreacting person.
One day I was doing a few laps around the block before setting off on my first walk of the afternoon when I noticed Tom's dog wandering loose in the neighborhood. And what did I see attached to her collar?
Tom's pedometer.
I've tried to have a reasonable conversation with Tom about this, but he refuses to answer his door.
He says my death threats make him afraid.
posted by Lankadata at 4:52 AM
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