Author's Preface: Everyone in this story is eighteen years old or older. The story is entirely fictional. Any similarities to real people or events are purely coincidental. Constructive comments are always welcome.
Enjoy
Magic Step Counter - Joe buys a one-of-a-kind step counter
Joe stayed the same size, 6' 2" tall and 155 pounds, all through high school and college. He never even bothered to weigh himself. He ate all the wrong foods, drank, did drugs, and never exercised. His family was skinny so there was no reason to believe he wouldn't stay skinny. After engineering school, he got a desk job and continued with the same habits and lifestyle.
Working in an engineering office wasn't so bad but there were virtually no single women there. That was what he missed most about college, the women. In college, he did all right with the ladies. He was no Don Juan but there were so many single women available, that he managed to score enough. He even had a couple of girlfriends.
In the real world, he rarely saw an available woman during the day. At night, he tried going to bars to pick up women, but it was competitive out there and he'd always been a little reserved around women. He dreaded trying dating apps.
He complained about it to one of his male friends. In the nicest way possible, his friend suggested losing weight and getting in better shape. His pants were tight and not in a good way. He suggested Rogian for his receding hairline. Joe looked down and noticed that the pockets of his slacks were bulging. He'd never had that happen before.
On his way home, he stopped and bought a bathroom scale. He'd never owned one before. When he got home, he unpacked it and stepped on it. "That can't be right," he thought. He took off all his clothes and tried again. It must be broken.
The next morning, on his way to work, he returned the scale and bought another brand. All day he thought about one hundred and ninety pounds and thought how ridiculous that was. When he got home, he took out his new scale and stepped on them. He wanted to go back and get the other one. The scale read one hundred and ninety-two pounds. He quickly stripped off all his clothes, including his wristwatch and ring, and got back on. One hundred and ninety pounds. He'd only been out of college for a few years. After a quick calculation, he realized that he gained thirty-five pounds - probably more. Before, anytime he weighed himself, he'd had his clothes and shoes on.
Joe was in panic mode. He was only twenty-eight years old. As abhorrent as the idea was, Joe decided to go out for a run. About halfway down the block, he began to wheeze and cough, barely able to catch his breath. He thought he might vomit. A passerby asked if he needed an ambulance.
He'd never been much of a runner. In high school, if any gym class included running, he figured out a way to get out of it. Why run if no one was chasing you?
Later, back at home, after the first two beers of a six-pack, he began to wonder if his failure with the ladies was because he was overweight and out of shape. He didn't think that was it, but when he looked in the mirror, he looked a little dough-ish. "Oh my god," he thought, "I'm fat."
He sat at his computer and visited places on the web he never thought he'd need. He typed in "losing weight" and the screen filled with tips on diet and exercise. He studied them while eating his dinner of a family-sized bag of potato chips and the rest of the six-pack.
The one thing most sites recommended was exercise. Some suggested running but as he demonstrated today, that wasn't happening. Most sites recommended walking. Joe mostly just walked from his car to a building, and he didn't much like that.
They suggested ten thousand steps a day. Joe estimated that it was fifty steps to his car from his house and maybe three hundred steps to his office. That came out to seven hundred steps he was sure to do. He only needed another 9,200 more steps a day. Joe grabbed a package of Twinkies out of the cabinet and thought about this.
In his exhaustive internet search, he noticed a lot of ads for things called "step counters." The most common one was Fitbit. That seemed reasonable to him, but they were more expensive than he was willing to spend.
He was going to have to think about this later. The weekend was coming and that was no time to think about exercise.
The next morning, the house next door was having a garage sale and Joe thought he'd check it out. That would give him some more steps.
He stopped by for a while but didn't see anything worth looking at. Then he saw what looked like an old mechanical step counter that was broken. It was priced at $1.
The lady running the garage sale said it belonged to the previous homeowner. They had found some of his junk in the attic during their recent remodel. The neighbors told her all about the previous owner when she moved in.
They said that he was handsome for an eighty-year-old and he exercised daily. He wore that step counter everywhere he went. No one understood why. He was in great shape. People told him he should get a new electronic one with all the new features, but he said that he liked his old one just fine.
She told Joe that there was a lot of gossip about him around the neighborhood. She heard that he had lots of different ladies visit his house at all hours. Some were much younger than him. He moved in when he was around fifty years old and some of his companions were in their early twenties. That did not suit the older ladies in the neighborhood. Nor did they enjoy that sometimes he would have two or three ladies there at the same time. He never slowed down. One neighbor said that they heard him carrying on, the night before he died.
The neighbors went on and on about how noisy he was with his lady friends. On spring days, when the windows were open, sounds of passion could be heard by people several houses away into the early hours of the morning. They'd make noise for hours.
This woman was obviously titillated by the stories. He died in the house in his eighties and didn't have any family.
Joe didn't believe the gossip, but he bought the step counter anyway. It was only a buck. He thought he would fix it and give it a try. When he got home, he realized how beautiful it was. It looked a bit like an old pocket watch. It had a large dial, each tick equaled one step, up to 100 steps, and three smaller dials that ticked for every 100 steps, 1,000 steps, and 10,000 steps. It wasn't working and was covered in dirt, but it seemed undamaged.
While prying it open with a small screwdriver, Joe jabbed himself in the finger hard enough to draw blood. After the cussing, he put on a band-aid and then cleaned the blood off the step counter. He couldn't see anything wrong inside, so after a couple of drops of thin oil, he put it back together. He shook it and the big hand moved. After a bit more tinkering, he cleaned and polished it. It looked brand new. The only markings on it were Russian. He tried to find it on the web and although he found Russian-made pedometers, there was nothing quite like it.
Joe clipped it to his belt and walked around the house a little and it seemed to be working. Not bad for a buck and a few drops of blood and oil. Now he would at least know how many steps he took in a day. He forgot about the thing until he dressed for work on Monday. As an afterthought, he clipped it to his belt.
+++++
That morning, Joe got on the elevator at work, and a beautiful woman he'd never seen before got on with him. She stood closer to him than required and introduced herself.
"Hi, I'm Luna."
"I'm Joe," he said and shook her hand. He thought it was odd that a woman introduced herself to him.
Joe got off at his floor and Luna said, "Maybe I'll see you on the elevator tomorrow, Joe."
All day long, women paid attention to him and were pleasant.
Joe was at a loss as to why.
He went out for lunch and got a hotdog, chips, and a soft drink. He took it to the park to eat but everything he tried to eat tasted bad, even the soft drink. He tossed it all and headed back to the office. He wasn't hungry anyway. It was a beautiful day, and he had another thirty minutes left before he had to get back to work. He decided to take the long way back to the office. His walk was longer than he realized because he got back fifteen minutes late. It didn't seem like he'd been gone that long.
When he got home, he went out for a walk, and it felt great. He started jogging and he didn't get as tired as he thought. A few days ago, jogging made him want to vomit, but today he felt refreshed. He looked at the step counter and it said that he'd taken 20,673 steps. He wasn't sure how long he'd been out but thought that it must still be broken.
That night he slept better than he had in years. He dreamt about Luna, the woman in the elevator.
