Wasted Youth

• Digital Scales
• Baby Scales
• Bathroom Scales
• Counting Scales
• Floor Scales
• Food Scales
• Hanging Scales
• Kitchen Scales
• Medical Scales
• Postal scales

It is no wonder that Americans are obsessed with weight with all the scales with which we come into contact in a typical day. From the time we wake up in the morning, until the time we go to bed at night, we are seeing scales, scales, scales.

Let’s take a typical day. The first thing we do is wake up and head to the bathroom for our morning hygiene routine. There, sitting on the floor waiting is the bathroom scale. We step onto it hoping to see a number that is lower than yesterday’s or at the very least isn’t any higher. We get dressed and then head downstairs.

Into the kitchen we go, and gather the ingredients for a breakfast smoothy of yogurt and strawberries. We pull out the kitchen scale and measure out six ounces of strawberries before dropping them into the blender with the yogurt. After drinking our breakfast, we grab up the outgoing mail and head out the door.

While most of the mail can be placed in the mailbox, there’s one birthday card for Aunt Millie that is probably overweight for an ordinary letter stamp. It’s one of those oversized cards that plays a little song when you open it. Oh well, a quick stop at the post office on the way in to work will take care of that. The post office clerk drops the card onto a postal scale to calculate the correct amount of postage required. You hand him a dollar and pocket your change.

Then it’s on to work. The factory is filled with scales. In the warehouse there are counting scales that help the line feeders bring the correct number of components out to the assembly lines. At the end of the assembly line there’s another scale for quality control. It’s so accurate that the QC inspector can tell if something as small as the owner’s guide is missing from the carton of a home theater system. In the shipping department, there’s another scale to calculate shipping charges for the outgoing packages. There’s even a pallet scale for the forklift operators to weigh every pallet as it is put onto the tractor trailer trucks to make sure the truck doesn’t go over its weight limit.

At lunch time, there’s a scale at the cafeteria cash register station because you pay by the ounce for the salad bar. After lunch, a quick check in with the office Weight Watchers group requires everyone to hop on the nurse’s balance scales to track their weekly progress toward their weight goals. Right on target. It looks like the portion control diet that you are following, thanks to your new kitchen scale is actually working.

After work, you start packing for your vacation, taking great pains to make sure each suitcase won’t go over the weight limit on the airline’s luggage scale because you don’t want to pay the overweight fee. As you think about the number of scales you’ve seen that day, you hear your son practicing the scales on the piano in the next room.