Conversing with the non-conversant

I tried to weigh myself this morning with Mark’s high tech scale.

I don’t usually want to know anything about my weight at all, but once in a while I get twinges of guilt about cookie binges and decide I’d better have a reality check. I do have my own scale, somewhere in storage; the kind that you stand on, look down at and read the numbers off of. Simple. To the point. Concise. Mildly inaccurate, in an encouraging sort of way.

Mark’s scale doesn’t actually do anything when you stand on it. You have to bend down and turn it on first. If you do manage to get it turned on, assuming that you’ve actually found the right button, you get beeps beeping and lights flashing.

Then it wants to know if you are Mark.

If not, it invites you to sign in as a guest and tell it your age. It generously wants to provide you with your percent body fat. It seems less interested in weight, but will do that too. Or so it says.

(Good Grief. “Lots” is as accurate a measure of body fat as I want to have, and I can give it to myself every time I try on new jeans. This was supposed to be a selling feature?)

I don’t want to have a conversation with a bathroom scale. I don’t really believe that running a small electrical charge through my feet, as it claims to do, is going to give me information about my overall health – unless to tell me I am gullible and there is a bridge in Brooklyn with my name on it. So if that’s what it wants to talk about, it can find another ‘guest.’

I don’t let my computer talk to me either. If I hit a website with a sound track I get out of it quickly. I don’t want my internet browser telling me ‘good morning’ or my email telling me the infamous “You’ve got mail!” I hate it that my printer wants to tell me that the print job is complete or that ink is running out. (On that topic it has rather a lot to say actually – none of it good.) I turned it off too.

This whole business is what brought us automated answering services instead of people to talk to in doctor's offices for heaven sake!

My sister once had a car that talked to her. Now that I think about it, it might still be in the family somewhere, continuing to regale its driver of tales of gas consumption, doors ajar and engine trouble. In fact, some of the younger generation were fond of trying to get it to reveal its extended vocabulary of trouble statements - but I’m not sure how, actually. Best not to know in that case, I suspect.

Verbal communication is, as it should be, low tech. The most I want to hear from my appliances is a ‘ding’ – to let me know my cookies are done baking!