Kung Pow Chicken

I like to refer to the increasing size of my belly and my will to be thin again as the Battle of Middle Girth. Unlike the battles in Lord of the Rings where a queer elf, a dirty dwarf, an old queen in long white robes, and a group of retarded, hairy footed midgets could fight off the majority of an Orc army with rudimentary (at best) weapons, I use technology to help me win the fight. The newest weapon in the epic battle against this sack of extra calories draping off my hips is a Fitbit.

The Fitbit is a small device that tracks your steps throughout the day and gives you feedback on how much of a lazy slob you were. After my first day of wearing it, the step count was so low that it asked me if I had special needs that needed to be accounted for. The exact words the program used were “Are you handicapped?” My first reaction was to throw the thing on the floor and stomp on it until it could be more accurately described as a MicroFitbits, but then I decided to re-evaluate the problem.

There was no way I only took 1500 steps in a day. Granted, I drive a lot, and that means I sit a lot; but I still have to park the car and walk to wherever I am going. Also, we walk the dogs, take out the trash and other such activities that would bring steps to the table. So naturally, I assumed that the device was not recording all of my movement. Determined to get an accurate reading, the next day I made sure that I doubled up on the heft of my steps. Walking heavily not only made the counter more accurate, but it also burned more calories…and that’s what I call a win-win.

When I’m at work, I like to listen to my iPod. Personally, I like listening to the subtle sounds of Megadeth to soothe out all the distractions and allow me to get my work done in relative peace. My own personal Enya. A few power chords into Warchest and I am a spreadsheet filling, email answering machine. I even take the iPod with me as I walk through the halls. It allows me to go from point A to point B while avoiding the endless, repetitive feedback loop that ranges from “How was your weekend?” to  “Got any big plans for the weekend?” The headphones that I have are high quality with a long, curly cord, and the ear pieces are padded for outside noise cancellation. I chose these headphones on purpose, as they were the most off-putting, obvious headphones I could find; even though I look like a sound engineer from the 80’s, they are quite effective at deterring all but the most determined of office gossip.

On the second day of wearing the Fitbit I walked down the hall to a meeting on the other side of the building, stomping my feet hard to make sure my steps were being counted while listening to “Wake Up Dead”, one of Megadeth’s greatest songs. Around the corner, that woman who wears the really obnoxious perfume (every office has one) was moving in the opposite direction towards me. I could smell her before I could see here; the wafting odor of her aging taste in olfactory hues reached out ahead of her like old, wrinkly fingers. As we passed each other, I caught a full face of her Sunshine and Cattle Anus by Some French Douche Le’Scent. My nasal mucosa started the long, inevitable, slow build up to a massive sneeze.

As I twitched during a bunch of pre-half sneezes, my fingers got tangled in the cord from my headphones, pulling them halfway off my head. Out of the corner of my eye that wasn’t obscured by the ear piece, I saw the regional manager, whom I had never met before, looking at the side show of my existence at this particularly graceful moment. I continued to move as nonchalantly as possible in an effort to conceal the fact that I was having some issues. Marching down the hallway like an excited band member, knees bouncing up to my chest, with my hand stuck and my headphones half off in the middle of a perfume-induced, slowly developing mega sneeze, I realized that half the office was watching me.

I saw the regional manager turn to my manager and ask a question. If my lip reading skills are up to par, it wasn’t the first time in the past two days that this question had been asked about me. I only needed to know the last word of his three-word question to understand, with horror, what the question was:

“…Handicapped?”