Home Guru: Secret Rituals With My Home’s Most Used Gadget
Of all the gadgetry in my home, there is one device with which I have an intense, almost unnatural relationship: my bathroom scale.
Each and every morning I surrender myself to it just before I jump into the shower. If this simple act stopped there, it would be considered perfectly normal behavior, but there’s a secret ritual that has developed over the years that may render normalcy questionable, and certainly with this writing, it’s no longer a secret.
The ritual kicks in when, with my big toe, I tap the glass surface of the attractively designed gadget, step on lightly and wait with bated breath as digital figures start their little dance, bouncing back and forth, much like the meat scale on The Biggest Loser. The final number pops up in an excessively large digital display, the only reading I am able to achieve without my glasses.
More often than not, I don’t accept the preliminary hard evidence. Surely the scale must need to “warm up” before it gives me an accurate reading. I step off and on again, but this time, I lower my weight slowly as I lean on a shelf nearby. The result of this little trick may actually be higher than the first reading.
Convinced that the floor tiles where the scale rests must be uneven, I step off again and nudge it along the floor a few inches to another spot and try again. If I get a more favorable weight, I will stop there. If not, there may be a couple of more nudges along the floor, before I am forced to call out to my wife, “Honey, do you think the scale is off this morning? Maybe it’s the change in the weather? ”
For a while I had two scales in the bathroom, each a different brand. I’d weigh myself on both and then accept the average weight.
As I write this, I’m thinking to myself, okay, now the reader knows I’m a nut job, but considering that one out of every three women and one out of every five men in this country are on a diet, surely other home scales get a similar workout. No, you say?
With our distant ancestors, not fettered by body image issues spawned by the media, it was the need for measurement in commerce that created the first scale.
The first automatic vending machine was a large spring scale that was imported to America from Germany in the late 1880s. People would go to a local store or arcade where they availed themselves of a coin-operated scale, requiring a penny to see one’s weight. During the 1920s and 30s, Peerless operated a scale on almost every corner and weighing in was considered an affordable novelty, even in the middle of the Depression. To feed interest in this pastime, fortunes were added to the ticket that was dispensed, then the names and pictures of movie stars who paid to have themselves promoted through this service.
By the 1940s improvements in mechanical scale technology made smaller, inexpensive spring scales available for the home. They stayed pretty much the same until the digital age when they advanced to digital models operated by batteries.
Today, bathroom scales come in many models and range from the inexpensive and simple to the more elaborate, supported by technology, where we can also know our Mass Body Index.
Through the years, I’ve met a few people who have told me they never get on a scale and don’t have one in their homes. Their only weight monitoring system might be to cut back on dessert when they feel their pants getting a little snug. This system is so foreign, so unfathomable to me that I can only marvel at it.
Judging from the number of bathrooms I’ve visited as a realtor, I would say that these lucky people are in the minority and that the bathroom scale is one home gadget that is here to stay.
I can still remember our family’s first clunky scale with the dial that protruded like the front of an old Edsel. I was only about eight when it was purchased. In those days, I was interested in seeing the numbers climb to prove that I was growing tall and strong. Today, it’s a different story, feeling as I do that, in this instance, less is more.
Bill Primavera is a residential and commercial Realtor® associated with Coldwell Banker, as well as a publicist and journalist writing regularly as The Home Guru. For questions about home maintenance or to buy or sell a home, he can be emailed at Bill@PrimaveraRealEstate.com or called directly at 914-522-2076.
