Colm O'Regan: I'm tracking my steps but I don't know what's being done with my data
Irish Examiner columnist, writer and comedian Colm O'Regan. Roger Kenny Photography Actor Head Shots www.rogerkenny.ie
Do you remember your first watch? How proud you were of it. No matter how basic it was, it still felt like a machine of wonder. Checking the time lots of times. Hours of entertainment measuring how long you could hold your breath for. Or when you got a Casio, how fast you could press the stopwatch twice.
Now I again have a watch I can’t stop checking. It’s almost wholesome compared to checking my phone because this watch tells me only good news: The thousands of steps I’m doing.
The black face does nothing so obvious as show you the time immediately when you look at it. I have to shake my wrist a little. That makes it hard to sneakily check the time. Or I can tap it. As if reminding the man in the shop that TIME IS MONEY. Even though I’m just buying a Chomp.
Steps. We’re all counting them now. I know they’re not a perfect measurement of anything. It’s pretty generous in what it regards as a step. At least a thousand of my steps appear to be unloading the dishwasher. I farted the other day and I got four steps. Maybe it’s just doing a health calculation based on how much better it is in than out.
It appeals to the bit of me that hates to let anyone else down, even if it’s the watch itself. On a number of days when I’ve struggled to get anywhere apart from just standing around, I’ll go out in the evening for a top-up and before you know it, one thing leads to another and I’m On a Walk. The watch congratulates me on the 10000 steps.
I’ve even started calling them workouts. I hooked it up to my phone and the earphones and now I hear the voice of the man who tells me what the total distance travelled is. He has that sort of World Accent that you’d hear on YouTube ads where an Entrepreneur tells us how he was a sap for years before finding the secret to success which he’s willing to share with us plebs.
But yer man gives me encouragement. “Total. Distance. Travelled: Three. Kilometres.”
Really? Well, shur we might as well round it up to the 5K, will we?
I don’t know what’s being done with the data. I mean like I think I said “No” to the question “Can we take the piss with your health info?” but you can never be sure. Will my watch rat me out to the life insurance people if the tilt of my arms suggests that I’m wall-to-wall bags-of-cans at the moment? Or will the dark web be in touch, asking me if I’m on a waiting list.
It tracks my sleep as well too but again the results are a bit generous. It says I was asleep for seven hours last night. But I know for a fact that for an hour of that, I was worrying about Something I Said To Someone Years Ago. But even still the amount I sleep is a little jarring. I always overestimate how much I sleep (perhaps due to lack of sleep) and having a monthly average of a little over 6 hours isn’t good. When you look it up in the raft of GO TO SLEEP books that have come out over the last while, it looks like I’m going to die next Tuesday week.
Which means I’d better get walking. Gotta get those steps done before the end of the month.
