i hate scales

all of them suck! i know, this subject has nothing to do with
unicycling, and i promise that this will be the only time i jump off topic like this... at least i won't do it any more times today. where was i... oh yeah, i hate scales. all the ones at my house are whack. i don't know why but i seem to have a habit of acquiring stupid scales. it doesn't matter if it's a bathroom scale or a fish scale.... they all lie.

scale one:
this was my first scale, that i had since college. my mom gave it to me and my wife, because she had too many. she was buying them at garage sales and i guess she over bought. it was this really old scale that was worn down and had rust around the edges. my wife couldn't stand having a used bathroom scale, not just that it was used... and that people stood on it with their feet... but that this scale has spent most of its life in someone else's bathroom...yuk. wow, it never really struck me until now, just how gross this thing was. anyway, my wife kept it in another part of the house...in fact it was very close to the outside of the house. this scale was only accurate to about 7lbs. so if you got on really carefully, you would weigh less. if you got on kind of roughly, you would generally weigh on the upper end of the accuracy. if you just jumped on... then you could be anywhere in the range. i don't even know why we bothered keeping that scale as long as we did.

scale two:
this is the scale we have today. it's a tanita body fat scale straight from japan. i was so excited when i first got this one. i was going to finally prove to everyone that i am as lean as a stick. it was all i japanese, so i let my wife set it up. she looked kind of confused while setting it up, and since i don't read japanese, i have to just assume that she did something wrong. there is no way i am 24% body fat! i should be like 4%. i keep telling my wife that this thing is crap, send it back. but she insist that it is measuring some kind of internal fat, not the same fat we are all used to. i don't buy it. i tried to set it up myself, not only is it in japanese, but it's metric... and i don't know who stole my calculator. i've come up with several theories as to why this thing is bogus. for years, i've blamed it on my feet being conductive, and since no one else is an electrical engineer in my house, that story held some validity for a while. i've been telling people for years, how that stupid scale claims i am 24%... and they all reply, "no way, i thought you were much less than that" this was pretty much how all my "friends" reacted to my scale story anyway.... at least until two days ago. that's when i told a long lost friend, my story. he replied, "that seems about right...." so i hate my scale.

scale three
this scale is the worst of them all. it's not even my scale.it belongs to my doctor. it's like one hundred years old, and requires someone to move little weights around in order to get an accurate reading. so i went in to the doctor's for something [i can't remember what it was, but she ended up suggesting i get a colonoscopy] and i had to get on the scale before anything. i jump on the scale fully clothed and i had kind of long hair at the time [i don't know how much hair weighs, but i just
wanted to point that out] the thing was oscillating up and down while the nurse was moving the scale, then she jots down some really high number. wtf? "hey", i said, "it didn't even stop", she said that it was ok, she knew what she was doing. no way, this is going on my permanent record. i was really not too happy about this. i couldn't let it go. after we got into the room, i brought up the subject once again, hoping
for a re-weigh. i asked her if it mattered that my clothes were really heavy. she smiled and ask how much i thought my cloths weighed... about ten pound i guess. then she smiled and started taking my blood pressure. i guess she thought i was joking, and didn't know that i was actually obsessed about my weight.

so the moral of the story is that all scales suck.