I made some new friends this week.  I wasn’t in the market for any because I like the ones I have, but these friends just kind of happened. And for a while, I was having trouble keeping up.

Several years ago I received a fitness tracker as a gift.  It was an upgrade from the standard clip-on-my-belt type of tracker.  In addition to counting steps, I could log calories and track sleep patterns.  I have to admit, the tracker did keep me moving on days when I didn’t feel like I wanted to and certainly helped me to show my husband how many times he woke me up each night with his tossing and turning. I don’t wear it all the time; just when some things start to feel a little tight and others, a little jiggly.

Now, let’s fast forward to last week and my new friends. I had been on vacation and felt like all the pints I drank were hanging on me like a 12-pack hydration belt that runners use to keep fueled-up during long runs.  I knew this called for ‘the tracker’. I pulled it out of the special box where I stored it and put it on the charger so that the next day when I woke up, I could strap it on and start counting, logging, and tracking.

Early the next morning when I was ready to roll, I noticed my cell phone was doing a system update.  I waited for it to finish, put on my tracker, and started taking as many steps as I could with the jiggling 12-pack around my waist-I figured it added a little resistance training to my regime. At the end of the day, I went to sync my tracker with the tracker app, but nothing happened. It was like I did all that jiggling and stepping for nothing.

Okay, so about now you are saying to yourself, “Where in the hell are all the friends she mentioned?”  Well, they’re on a fitness tracker community forum. Tons of them sharing the very same story about their trackers and how their phones did a system update and then their tracker wouldn’t sync so their steps weren’t recorded either. It was like we all stepped for nothing.  I know, it really wasn’t for nothing, but according to the records, it was.

I posted my story on the forum and for the next week, created a bond of mutual affection with about 50 of my fellow ‘hey-my-tracker-isn’t-tracking either’ trackers.  Their stories starting coming directly to my email and I read every one of them-for the first hour or so.  That’s how ‘friends’ are sometimes, a little clingy with you or sometimes, when they really aren’t your friend, they cling to someone else you know. Regardless, I finally had to put an end to all the new friendships-the message from Outlook about my mailbox size told me I had to do it and I was fine with it.

My friends and I really made an impact on the fitness tracker company who told us they were working on the problem, which seemed to be related to the software update we all completed.  They offered us a whopping 25% off a new tracker so that it too could stop working with the next system update.  As a result of all this, I put myself in charge of the tracker company’s next marketing campaign. It’s called, Forget the Jiggle, #JustStayFat.