Thursday, December 2, 2010

Stupid, condescending Wii

I got owned by my Wii today.

Let me back up. Waaaaay back up. All the way to two Christmases ago when Mister C got me a Wii Fit. It's a pretty fun little piece of equipment and fyi: I ROCK at boxing. Not bragging people, just telling the truth. Just ask Mister C. In fact, just mention to Mister C that you heard he likes to box with his wife and watch the twinge of fear cross his face. It's no holds barred my friends, and I take no prisoners.

Anyway. I did the whole body fit test when I got it and put in my goals and time-line and all that. I used it a few times. Then, like anything else to do with fitness right after January 1st, I never touched it again. Well, that's not entirely true. I'm pretty sure I had to move it out of the way several times to get the RockBand equipment out. But otherwise, not so much.

Fast forward to today. I decide I want to be reassessed by my Wii-Fit to see what kind of progress I've made since the last time I used it. First things first, I had to re-read all of the directions to figure out how to make it work again. Then, I had to change out the batteries because they were dead. Finally, after messing around with it for fifteen minutes, it was ready to use. It made me wait a few seconds and then told me to step up.

And then, it chastised me. It was all "It has been 353 days since you've used your Wii-Fit." It mentioned that I had lost 23.4 pounds since the last time and dropped (barely) into the healthy BMI range. Then, it said "Better late than never." Are you kidding me? What the heck? Who knew the Wii-Fit was a sarcastic trainer?

After the trauma of the body check, I decided to do some working out. I did some boxing (of course!) and a few strength exercises. Then I thought I would try some balance exercises. So I picked the snowboard slalom first. I royally suck at that. And I do mean royally. I think I missed 99% of the flags every time I went down the course. I couldn't control the board, I ended up in the fence every time. So after running the course eight times I decided that maybe snowboard slalom wasn't for me. I decided I would try the skiing slalom. At least for that I would be facing forward, certainly I could manage that much.

I did do better at the skiing than the snowboarding. But I still sucked. I did the skiing course about a dozen times and did improve substantially. It still felt really weird and my stupid Mii just refused to do what I thought I was telling it to do. I tried the ski jump a few times and did pretty good at that. Then I tried the tightrope walking, but gave up after falling off five times in a row.

At this point I was getting sort of discouraged. I mean every time I finished something it was telling me that I was "unbalanced" or at "amateur" level. It sucked. So I looked at my options and figured I would try some aerobic activity before I gave up completely.

I clicked through to the very basic, beginner level aerobic set. I started it up and tried following along. I thought I was doing pretty well but it kept telling me I wasn't following. It told me if I couldn't figure out the steps, maybe I should watch the other characters feet and try to follow that. I tried that and it still wasn't working. What the hell? I was so aggravated I was ready to sell the stupid thing on Craigslist.

So I started really watching the footprints on the screen as I was stepping up. They just wouldn't line up. And then it hit me. I stepped off. Made an adjustment. Then got back on. And suddenly all was right with the world. I'd had the stupid Wii board facing the wrong direction the whole time.

Wii: 1
Ditzy brunette: 0

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