Bela the cat Mourns Gary the Fitbit
Oh Gary. I guess at least we saw the end coming. Last week when you couldn’t achieve the right time, I knew there was a problem. Your display then went binary and then you split a little in the middle. I tried resetting you a few times, but we both knew it was over. As all friends must say goodbye, so must we.
I’ll always remember the time I tried you on in Target, the first time I took you out for a walk, the first time you rewarded me with a buzz to celebrate my first 10,000 steps. The addiction was spurred. I knew instantly that you were a game changer and you did not disappoint. I never left the house without you, I wore you in the house. You replaced that Swiss Army watch easily, for how could Seth think he could hold a candle to you, he only tells the time and the day of the month, and half the time he got that wrong. Where would I be without a constant knowledge of my steps, floors climbed, heart rate, sleep patterns, calories burned, and miles sloughed? Pbbt. Somewhere way back in the twentieth century.
Not only have you seen some serious strides in my health, you have played my obsessive nature like a fiddle to force those strides. Remember when you suggested getting off the tram a few stops early to log extra steps? Brilliant. Then you whispered in my ear that escalators are a fitbitter’s wet dream, even the big league ones out of the Náměstí Míru and JZP metros? And then that time when you mentioned that if I cut out lifts altogether I’d gain several thousand more steps per day. And never, Gary, did you laugh at me as I walked around my living room with a book after dinner on a low step day or marched around my bed at 11:57 p.m., trying to beat the buzzer.
Oh there were bad times, of course. I got yelled at once for (accidentally) using you during sex. Well, technically I got yelled at for noting down the activity results. But weren’t they fascinating!? Who’d have known that you gain steps while shagging? And floors, no less! Then there was last summer at my parents’ house, where I amassed about 50 steps a day. We understood together that a sedentary life was for neither you nor me, so we rallied. We took those afternoon walks every day in that awful Philadelphia humidity to the leers of neighbors, which was really part of the fun. Remember when three people asked if I needed a lift somewhere? Boy did we laugh. Then we got ice cream.
Gary. I send thee to the great beyond to wherever Fitbits and other small devices go when they die (back to China?). I send you with heartfelt thanks from a former couch potato, who you prodded to an active life by taking advantage of his obsessive need to reach goals and his abnormal love of the number 10. It has been a blast. I won’t lie; like a family might with a beloved terrier, I will replace you. But before Gary II arrives from Amazon I’ll mourn you (along with all those uncounted steps that will just disappear into nothing. Oh, you’re missing a trip to Japan too. Jerk.)
I will always remember you and probably keep you in my junk drawer (no China) just so I can take you out from time to time and let you read my pulse, just for old time’s sake.
