Because I am a geek

So I bought a Nike Fuelband. Mostly because Andrea Phillips has one and I was jealous. I liked the little fireworks display when you reach your fuel goal for the day. It’s probably market-state research for Zombies, Run! or something. Yeah, no, it was basically because it looks cool. 

Anyway, because Andrea and I are geeks like this, we were comparing fuel daily usages. She had warned me in advance that, being a writer, I would find it hard to meet the ordinary fuel goals (average is 2,000 a day), because obviously if I’m not sitting *totally still* I’m not doing my work. However! To my surprise, I’ve found myself getting over 2,000 every day, and quite easily over 3,000. 

So, obviously we needed to investigate whether Andrea’s band and mine were measuring at different rates. We needed to do it USING SCIENCE. Which is why, earlier today, had you spied on either of us (she in New York, me in London), you would have found us doing a Skype video chat while raising and lowering our arms precisely 10 times in perfect unison. We played When I’m Sixty-Four to keep us in time. 

The answer, incidentally, was that doing these identical movements produced almost identical band readings, and cannot account for me finding it easy to reach 2,000 while Andrea can have 800-fuel days. Possibly I just fidget more.