Tracked

A non-political post

I needed to take a brief break from politics. (Don’t worry, I’m thinking hours as opposed to days, there’s a country to save) and I started thinking about the ways that I’m being tracked.

For example, my watch and phone work together. The watch tracks things like my blood oxygen and heart rate, and other health stuff, and then reports it all to my phone, which reports back to me. I understood that they’d do this when I bought them, but I thought I could just ignore them. Which I can’t because they send me alerts. For example, when I was at my high school reunion a few weeks ago, both my watch and my phone warned me that it was VERY LOUD – well SURE – I was in a room with a DJ playing loud music and people were talking as loud as possible over the music. The alarm itself made more noise. Sigh.

My watch also tracks my sleep, and reports to my phone.

My bed also tracks my sleep, but it is far less accurate than my watch. My watch tells me that I sleep every night, I have REM sleep, and I don’t have apnea. Good Watch. The bed, on the other hand, neglects to take certain things into consideration in making its calculations. This means Alex. Alex doesn’t just sleep in bed with me, Alex sleeps veritably attached to me. Throughout the night, Alex will spend some time next to my stomach, some amount of time back to back, and then next to my legs, meaning, HE MOVES. Alex will fall asleep, hear something, jump up and down and start barking. Sometimes there is a sound which causes him to jump off the bed, run around, bark at something, and then jump back on the bed, mess around with the covers, do the circle thing, and return to sleeping wherever I am. Thus, my bed is convinced I haven’t slept through the night in the two years since Alex was adopted and joined our household. My bed is blissfully unaware that my superpower is that I can sleep soundly in a center airplane seat, meaning I DO sleep through the night. I have inherited from my mother the ability to sleep through anything except crying children. And yet, my bed sends me an email every month telling me how lousy I sleep. Here is Alex in his Halloween costume as a French artist.

My car has a gizmo that tracks where I am at all times. I don’t really mind that my car knows where I am. I don’t really go anywhere: mostly the Wegmans, the Acme, the Target, several WaWas and bunch of medical facilities. BUT if I ever did go somewhere, and my car ended up in a ditch, my car would know. The thing that’s like LoJack but a different brand would find me after my phone contacted the satellite to let it know I was in trouble. I’m not sure how that works, but they tell me it does. And no, I’m not going to try it out to see if it does work.

Mostly, though, I’m pretty sure that the first help to reach me would be some package I’d ordered from Amazon.

I know I’m tracked all around the internet. I accept this, despite locking down everything I can. But I have a complaint about it. There is a recipe I have been looking for, literally for YEARS. It was something both my mother and her mother made, and I never saw it anywhere else, but it must have come from somewhere. Neither of them ever wrote it down, and despite all my searching, nowhere on the internet does it exist. Nor does it exist in any of the cookbooks that it might be written in. You’d think that the ONE THING I cannot find would find ME. But alas, no. Failure of tracking, I guess.

And now that I’ve gotten all of that off my chest, it’s back to writing scripts for people to use with persuadable voters.