Incredible Shrinking Woman Held Hostage!

(My first rant on this blog...)

I've been fighting with my iPod nano ever since I got it for my birthday two months ago. It's an amazing device, capable of providing me with so much media availability...and so much frustration. In the past month I feel I've been beaten down to a fraction of my size by the tiny turquoise rectangle, barely the size of three squares of a Hersey bar. I've also had the eerie feeling that I was somehow being held hostage by Steve Jobs from beyond the grave...

I'm an avid walker, so my husband thought that for my birthday I'd enjoy a device that would provide music for my mileage. The latest incarnation of the iPod nano had a pedometer, so a perfect gift, right? And music-wise it is – amazing sound for the rehearing of the music of my life, the white earbuds making Joni Mitchell's wide-ranging vocals dance somewhere about three inches above the top of my head. And I will die before I ever fill up the capacity – 350 songs on it and still 12+GB of room!

No, my battle with the turquoise demon has been over control of the pedometer. First time out walking, I obediently entered my height and weight as required (true weight,too!...well, within five pounds...) and walked a measured mile. The iPod was very generous, telling me that I had walked 1.1 miles. By the time I finished my walking for the day, I had walked somewhere between two and three miles. Obviously, the iPod needed some recalibration. I downloaded the iPod nano user guide, all 67 pages of it. (I believe I can tackle anything given the right user manual and enough time, which was over two months in this case.) As per instructions, I proceeded to press every button that said “calibrate” or “recalibrate” under the walking program.

I consulted the on-line community and found the frustration with the pedometer function was not mine alone. Most found the calibration confusing and the accuracy unreliable. The most positive statement that I could find went something like this: “It works O.K. sometimes, when I run, as long as I don't go up hills or vary my pace.” (“Come on, Apple!” I thought. “You can make me feel like I'm in Madison Square Garden with Eric Clapton and Steve Winwood! You can do better than this with your pedometer!”) So I spent the next two months walking over 40 miles, stopping every quarter or half mile just to recalibrate or change the settings on the pedometer function. I eventually started changing my height, thinking that my stride must be abnormal for my entered height. I was down to 4' 5” before it started to approach an accurate mile. (I'm 5' 4”.) (“Come on, Apple! You made me remember why Bridge Over Troubled Water is my favorite song of all time. Why can't you measure an accurate mile without shrinking me down to the height of an eleven-year-old?”)

So I returned to the user guide (again!) It seems that the only way to accurately calibrate the iPod is to pretend that you are a runner and not a walker (which it doesn't actually tell you anywhere). Though the walk buttons lead you to calibration buttons, only the run buttons lead you to the calibration button that really matters. And before you can get there, you are forced to choose a workout and then even forced to pick a playlist before you can walk a quarter of a mile and then, finally, be rewarded with access to the true calibration button. I can hear the ghost of Steve Jobs: “Well, you bought this wonderful product of ours, so you must fit our profile. You are probably a runner who only walks when injured, so, of course, you will check out the running program first. And since you are such a disciplined person (making enough money to buy this iPod in the first place) you will want to have a programed workout when you run. And since this is an iPod, of course you will want to choose a playlist before you begin your run. After all, you really bought this for the music.” I felt as though I had been snatched out of my simple world of high mileage walking and was being held hostage with a bunch of disciplined marathon trainees...

So one day I went to the quarter mile track at the local high school and pretended to be the pre-planned-workout-playlist-sensitive runner that I'm not and was rewarded by being given access to the coveted recalibration button, the one that actually does something. I then registered my first accurate quarter mile...then my first accurate half mile. I spent the next hour walking different distances, recalibrating, all on the running function. When I returned to the walking function of the pedometer, I could see that the Great and Powerful iPod had registered my pathetically slow “running” times and had categorized me as a “walker”. The walking function now accurately tracked my walking distances, provided I didn't try to do anything stupid, like press the recalibrate button on the walking function, which I found only defaulted to the previous inaccurate tracking...

Funny thing, though - I'm not sure how far I actually walked that day. Between all the starts and stops and quarter mile recalibrations and the switching from run to walking functions, there was no easy way to add up my mileage. I think I walked somewhere between two and three miles...which was the approximate distance it estimated the first time out two months ago. Yeah, irony...

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be: meetings.

- Dave Berry, "25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years"