Pedometropathy

In which our Hero lets his meter get under his skin

I’ve been playing with a Fitbit pedometer for the last few weeks. It has some clever sensors on it, so it can found how many flights of stairs you clime, and it’s pretty good at figuring out when you’re walking around. But the “big deal” on this thing is that it also has wireless sync. So as long as you come close to it’s charger, any charger, it’ll sync its data with the website and give you reports and stats and such.

It definitely has an effect. I’ve tried to build a habit of taking opportunities to walk for years, and despite success there, the fact that I have data still makes me make extra walking trips I didn’t have to. No, I don’t want a coffee, but now I’ll come with you for the trip because it’s a few extra steps.

Oh, and it also has a curious feature for tracking sleep, which I’m trying to use. You wear it on your non-dominant wrist and it can detect by motion when you’re stirring enough. I don’t think it’ll be replacing a sleep lab any time soon, but as a high level approximation, it’s very interesting to see how and how much (well, how little) I sleep.

But this isn’t a product review. Oh no, this is about an incidental side effect. See, when you set up your Fitbit, it asks for your name. And then when you pick it up after it’s been idle for a bit, it’ll show a message, supposedly greeting and encouraging you. “Hello, so-and-so!”

Except I don’t like using my name for things. And going back to old tradition, I decided to put in a stupid, mocking name because that’s always funny. L- O- S- E- R- [Submit] And it turned on and said “Welcome, Loser” and I laughed and that was a few weeks ago and I’ve been ambulating ever since.

And here’s the weird thing. Now, I pick it up after I’ve charged it, and it says “Let’s go, Loser!” And I don’t laugh. I’m actually irritated that this stupid piece of hardware is calling me that. And I remember that I set that up deliberately, but it still comes off very annoying.

So I’ve got this device that I find interesting, but *don’t like.* And not on a functional level, but a personal level. Not anthropomorphized, not an objection to an imagined personality, I just feel pissed off when I notice the display (which is not even every time). And it keeps pissing me off, and I keep scowling at it.

I could change it, I know. But I don’t. And I won’t. Not till I figure out why a gadget calling me names pisses me off so completely when a human doing the same couldn’t reach me.