I Realized My GPS Watch Is Making Things Up
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Gadgets, Humor, Satire, iOS, Technology

SATIRE

I Realized My GPS Watch Is Making Things Up

It’s gotten to the point where the watch is trying to tell me the future

Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash

I looked on my brand new, glistening GPS watch for all this cool data about myself. It showed me my heart rate — one moment, my pulse was 100. I felt pretty relaxed, but alright, it may have been a stressful day. Another time, it showed my heart rate was 40, even though my heart was racing. Weird, but you have to trust the numbers.

And then I looked at data on how I was sleeping from my GPS watch, and now I know — my GPS watch is full of shit. It’s saying I slept for nine hours last night. I only slept three hours. Does the six hours I spent from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. on the couch count as “sleep?” That’s the only way I can possibly explain it.

And then I started to look at the steps I was taking every day. One day, I didn’t get out of bed except to get water and heat up my frozen food. Somehow, I walked 100,000 steps. Another day, I ran a marathon, and I only took 5,000 steps. Again, I realized this “fitness” data is full of shit.

For a couple days, I adhered to the “fitness” data of my new GPS watch like it was gospel. When I went on a run in the middle of the woods, it told me I was running 15 minute mile pace, even though I was sprinting. I had to sprint even faster to meet my pace goals. However, when I was on walk, the GPS watch told me I was “running” 12-minute mile pace — there is no way I walk faster than I run, right?

I spoke to my buddy, a software developer at Google, about this GPS watch. He took a quick look at my GPS watch, tinkered around with the settings, and then diagnosed the problem.

“Yeah, man. It’s using Apple Maps. You know Apple Maps is trash,” he said.

While Apple Maps is trash, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, my friend has a conflict of interest — of course he wants me to use Google Maps over Apple Maps. However, one time I used Apple Maps to direct me home, and instead it directed me into the middle of a lake. I wondered whether my house was flooded, but it took some consultation with my friend to realize that Apple Maps simply deceived me.

My GPS watch, however, is really trifling these days. Now, it has a metric called “stress level.” How in God’s name does my GPS watch know how stressed I am? Garmin says the watch measures stress by the variability between heart beats, but maybe my heart beat is variable because this watch is trash at determining my actual heart beat.

Don’t even get me started on the fraudulent “respiration rate” feature as well. Garmin says resting respiration rates are usually 12–20 times per minute, and 40–50 times for intense physical activity. I spent five minutes sprinting to catch the bus the other day, and it told me I had a respiration rate of 8 times per minute. But when I’m on the couch, with a bag of chips and a beer, my respiration rate is 60 times per minute?

It seems like the GPS watch has one tactic for calculating all this “data”: making shit up. It’s gotten to the point where the GPS watch is trying to tell me the future. It says that an asteroid is going to hit my town in two days, and that humans will go extinct in 200 years. Sure, GPS watch. Sure.