Breaking up with WW: The Scale
February 21st, 2007 at 10:03 pm (Physical)
My mother, of course, owned a bathroom scale when I was growing up.
It was a bubblegum-pink monstrosity of a thing, skinned with a textured vinyl sheet. The scale lived between the toilet and the sink and delivered The Truth through its square little window. That dial face registered weights up to 200 pounds, but was not sophisticated enough to “double back” on itself the way scales did in the 1980’s and 1990’s — borrowing from the 20-pound hashmark to read, say, “230.”1
By the time scales could “double back” and read weights higher than 200 pounds, my mother was well on her way through 10 pregnancies and had already waved the white flag of surrender against the tide of obesity. So, it was more for the novelty that Mom bought another scale when they went digital, then left it conspicuously in the bathroom on the main floor of our house — a bathroom she never used.
There it sat, inviting us to step on and Know The Truth. Unfortunately, whether for batteries that routinely died, for brothers that used the scale as a trampoline, or for the early-90’s technology that never met snuff, the scale was maddeningly inconsistent. In one session (step on, step off, step on, step off, step on) it would yield 4 or 5 different weights. The digital numbers blinked red as if sputtering their frustration. “247. 259. 233. Oh hell if I know.”
- Who weighs 20 pounds, anyway? [↩]
