Adventures with a Click Bit Photo Activity Tracker

My friend Kasia (not her real name) bought a Click Bit bracelet last month to track her photography activity and immediately became obsessed with recording every detail of her camera life. Not passively obsessive, either—she’s become a compulsive, fanatical, evangelistic, raving maniac. But let’s go back to when she was still just chubby Kassie…

Kasia’s ex-boyfriend Karl (not his real name—his real name is Carl) has the gift of diplomacy that’s just slightly smaller in volume than an ant’s navel. He told Kasia that she was beginning to get a little flabby—around the lens cap area, I think. So after she dumped Carl, Kassie bought the Click Bit and began bullying everyone around her to do the same.

“I set daily megapixel goals,” she told me. “If you get a Click Bit, we can compete.”

I wasn’t having any of it. I don’t like to compete—that’s why I drive a Subaru.

“It warns me about over sharpening,” she beamed. “You know you have a problem with your Unsharp Mask sometimes, too.”

“My problem is overindulging in HDR,” I countered. “The readers told me so. Anyway, I use the High Pass Filter method these days to avoid those little aliases.”

“You mean ‘artifacts,’” she corrected. “Well, it also gives me a running total of my Image Compression. Can you beat that? And it’s all so easy.”

For the next 17 minutes, Kasia (whose real name I think I should tell you now so you can stay away from her is Katarzyna) connived, cajoled, coaxed and in general tried to con me into buying a Click Bit Photo Activity Tracker of my own.

There’s a free iOS app; she wears it to bed; in only four weeks she’s already downloaded 1,300 images; her Moiré pattern is almost back where it was when she was a freshman in college and so forth and so on for what seemed like forever.

“And the band is even 18% gray,” she said finally, in a last ditch effort to sway me to become her Click Bit Buddy.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. “You know what kind of guy I am. When I get the urge to exercise, I sit down and rest until the urge goes away.”

Just when things looked as bleak as they could be, they got a bit worse. Kasia added a few more bracelets to her collection. After the Click Bit came the Sit Bit for her dog, and for her dim cousin, a Nitwit Bit.

“You act like I’m becoming a compulsive, fanatical, evangelistic, raving maniac,” she said bitterly.

“If the bit fits,” I replied. And fled.

—Jon Sienkiewicz

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