Behind the Ironic Column

…The pedometer situation is beginning to seem silly.  Not that pedometers themselves are silly – I love them and that’s just the problem.  My hall bookshelf now has three different pedometers lined up on it in varying degrees of disarray or malfunction. 

The transparent blue one was my favorite – and the one I deliberately picked out at a store.  It folds up nicely while you’re wearing it and folds down to reveal the actual data so you can read numbers without removing it from your belt.  Plus it has printed instructions for what each button does – and it actually works more or less the way the instructions claim.  This is not true with many other pieces of equipment.  I have a digital clock with tiny buttons that have to  be pushed in a specific sequence for a particular task to be activated.  It’s never obvious or self-explanatory but something you need a keycode to figure out.   So I really like this pedometer – except for the fact that the belt clip is thin clear plastic and was definitely not designed for any long term use.  So the clearness of the plastic is now marred by the duct tape I have holding it together.  Still holds together but I’m not sure for how long.  And now it needs a battery – at least that’s what I deduce because the numbers stopped appearing and everything displays as 88888.   Not a good sign.  The little batteries are not inexpensive so I have to decide  whether to get a battery or just let the whole thing go.  It’s hard to use a pedometer without a belt clip.

Then there’s the triangular blue and black one.  It reminds me of a Star Trek communicator and it does  “talk”.  That is, it has an annoying voice that recites your numbers when you least expect it and often in front of people who shouldn’t  hear those details.  This is especially true if you’re looking particularly tuckered out and the voice says you only walked half a mile.  The sneer in the voice’s tone may be all in my head, but still I find it irritating.  Likely it’s that voice that caused me to have this particular pedometer in the first place.  I found it on the street one morning – looking a little beat up as if someone had tossed it away in a rage.   I can imagine the sneering voice driving one to that extreme.  In spite of that annoyance,  I used it for a few weeks but it also seems to have a battery problem.  Nothing at all appears on the screen now and the voice is mercifully silent.  The same question applies – do I try to get it to work again or just forget it since it was a found object anyway.

The third one is red with gray accents – also plastic but of a sturdier variety than the pale blue one.  And no problems with the belt clip breaking so far.  It’s a little simplistic but it seems to work pretty well and has no audio commentary.  Silence is a good thing.  It’s main drawback is that the reset button is too prominent.  It’s easy to reset the numbers by accident – so you never know exactly how far that hike was.  I didn’t buy this one either. It came free with something I ordered from a mail-order shop last year.  The belt clip on this one swivels so I can tilt it up to see what the numbers are without taking it off my belt.  (The voice one doesn’t swivel  – it expects you to push the audio button which is large and conveniently located so that you push it accidentally just by moving).  The red one met with an accident a couple of weeks ago and I’m not sure if it can recover. I was going downstairs in my building (the interior stairs which are unadorned concrete steps) when my cell phone rang.  I usually have it on my belt as well when I’m wearing jeans.  So I stopped to remove the cell phone and dislodged the pedometer in the process.  It bounced down several steps and separated into pieces.  After gathering them up – one thing about red parts is that you can see them even on dusty stairs – and finding the battery which had jumped out of its compartment, I tried to reassemble it.  The pieces fit back together and don’t appear to be broken but the device doesn’t work.  This could also be a battery issue – either some connector was broken when the battery fell down the steps or it was dying anyway and that was the final straw.  But I can’t tell without purchasing a new battery and seeing if it works.

All three of these devices are of a similar size and reasonably similar age.  The trend toward measuring our steps is relatively new, so they’re really not old enough to be obsolete.  Somewhere, I have a much older mechanical pedometer from one of the earlier fitness trends – the non-digital kind which is probably a curiosity now.  But it would be reasonable to think that these three would use the same type of battery.  That way I could buy one new battery and use it to determine which ones are still functional. But of course that’s not how we do things in the consumer/disposable society.  Each one has a completely different battery number.  

Neither device is perfect – I like different things about all three of them.  There may be a fourth model that would have exactly what I want, but I’m not even considering buying a new one.  Three styles is more than enough – and maybe it’s two too many.  Maybe I’ll let fate take a hand and just buy whichever battery turns up first in the course of my other shopping.  In the meantime, my calendar entries for miles walked every day are sitting vacant – looking accusingly like I’ve stopped walking.  I haven’t – but I have no recorder to verify the number of steps in my daily treks across the city.

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