See, this is why the erosion of privacy and data convergence worry me.
Sometime in the future, I will skype video conference my doctor for my yearly physical. It will be convenient, because I won’t have to wait in a waiting room for an hour for my appointment. Bonus: No blood draws or treadmill tests, because my fitbit 5000 health tracker gizmo will tell my physician everything she needs to know.
My doctor will inquire about my health, and I will, as always, say everything is fine.
Unsatisfied, my doctor will grill me with further questions, testing my lying skills from differing angles. I will, as always, masterfully weave a magnificent tale of ‘truth’ about how healthy I’ve been eating and how I exercise all the time (thinking about exercise counts, right?).
My doctor won’t immediately yell ‘bullshit’ based on my fitbit stats, instead she will try to gently prod my tall tale of health for a number of minutes – not because she’s unsure of the truth, but because in this day and age, seeing patients squirm in their blatant lies will be a sport or treasured hobby for doctors.
There will be popular T.V. shows dedicated to video captures of the funniest video conference physicals, and my doctor will have a small betting pool going amongst colleagues about who’s patient will be featured on the show first. Anything to keep the day job interesting, right? Right.
With enough squirming out of the way, my doctor will proceed to open a shared computer screen window for our video conference and start typing my name into google’s search box. Type type type .. “J-a-s-o-n-space-b-a”
Right around this time, when my name’s being typed in, my doctor will receive a 911 notice on her smartphone, saying one of her patients, a “Jason Baker” has a blood pressure rate going through the roof.
At that most opportune moment, my wife will join the video conference and say hello. The doctor will pause her typing and exchange pleasantries with my wife. The 911 notice on the doctors smartphone will subside ever so briefly, at which point my wife will ask how the physical is going. Next the doctor will remember where she was, and start typing into google again.
“k-e-r-space-l-a-s-t-space-5-space-g-r-o-c-e-r-y-space-r-e-c-e-i-p”
It will be at this moment that a “flatline” notice will alarm on my doctor’s smartphone, you know the one, with the adorable stylized/cuddly skull and crossbones emoji? The ‘flatline’ notice will be for the same patient as before, naturally. The doctor will crack a joke about how this happens all the time, and she thinks the notification/alarm notifications for fitbit have some bug in the latest software update. My wife will laugh, and I will attempt a grin while trying to catch my breath and noticing my left arm is feeling funny.
The doctor will complete her search request, five grocery receipts will pop up in full 16K hi-res glory on the video conference.
For a brief glimpse of time, perhaps two seconds, there is silence. One of those beautiful but especially rare moments where you have this out-of-body experience and seconds feel like glorious minutes or hours, all in slow motion – the kind of moment where you savor the silence and just take it all in – especially if you’re me, and you already know what your wife and doctor are realizing.
Slow motion moment over, with a scream: “WHAT THE HELL, JASON?”
(Just to be explicitly clear, it’s my wife..)
“What the hell, Jason? Four fridays in a row where all you bought was those ‘drumstick’ ice cream cones?” – my doctor starts seeing dollar signs, thinking about how the betting pool with colleagues is up to about five grand – “I thought you said you were going to the corner store to buy an ice cream, and you came home with a single ice cream, but these receipts are showing that you bought four-packs of the ice cream 4 weeks in a row?! What do you have to say for yourself?!?!” – the doctor is deciding between somewhere nice in the carribean or perhaps a nice trip to tahiti – I am sinking in my chair, slowly dipping out of view of the video conference camera, VERY carefully checking my desk to ensure none of the candy bar wrappers are actually in view of the video conference camera.
“One moment ladies, I need a restroom break.”
I take the moment to collect myself. I wave my hand in front of the faucet with a gesture to the left and cold water comes on. Yeah yeah, the water is wired backwards – it’s actually piped in correctly, but we bought the microsoft or google faucet, not the apple one. It was half the price, sue me. Anyway, I splash some cold water on my face and towel it and the sweat from my face. I give myself a moment for my tell-tale nostrils to stop flaring the “he’s telling a big fat fucking lie right now” flare of betrayal – and I return.
As before, I weave a wondrous tale of something ludicrous, probably something that starts with “sorry honey”.
“Sorry, honey – I’ve been buying ice creams and splitting them with your dad – you know how he’s having a really hard time right now because they canceled the bachelor series last month after someone was killed on live tv (ratings and profits, they must go ever upward, right? right.) – so I’ve been buying a 4 pack to conceal our secret meetings, he eats 2, and I eat one.”
The moment I name drop my father in law, my wife will already be speed dialing him, by the time I finish my story his video will be starting to come online. 5 minutes later we’ve troubleshooted his video conferencing problems (poured water on the microphone again), and my wife will ask her father about our clandestine ice cream meetings.
My father-in-law will sense hot water so he backs me up in these fantastic lies.
Usually, in this type of scenario he’d be overly jolly to either make the lie more fantastic to poke-the-bear (that’s what we call it), or – if it were truth – he’d be excited to recount the fun he’s been having. My father-in-law is a smart man though, and he will have noticed the white-coat, and he will have noticed that my wife an I’s faces are the exact same shade of red, and he will notice my nostrils flaring like a maniac, so instead of weaving a tale, he’ll just stop with a confirmation of my fantastic tale, without adding his characteristic ‘enhancements’.
If my tell is nostrils flaring, my father-in-laws is an answer to any question being less than 300 words. My wife will of course pick up on this and immediately speed dial the oracle of truth, mother-in-law. Mom-in-law’s video starts coming online, and I will see my story and my ice cream adventures falling apart in my mind.
Being a computer programmer, and a good boy scout who’s always prepared when it comes to doctors visits, I will quickly execute a command on my computer to wget a super-secret crash-in-laws-computer webservice I had installed earlier in the month when I helped install a computer game (i knew i had a physical coming up, so sue me). At that moment my in-laws will mysteriously drop from the video conference.
I will muse aloud that they must have spilled water on the mic again, and note that our time’s almost up.
Some while back, our doctor will have decided on tahiti and made herself some popcorn to watch me sweat on the stand while testifying. With in-laws out of the picture, my doctor and wife confer on a diet plan for me and I start to become irate. “I didn’t even eat but one ice cream a week, give me a break, this is bullshit.” My doctor will calmly interject – “but, your fitbit 5000 is showing me that you had around 2000 calories of sugar within a half hour for each of these mystery ice cream trips?” – the doctor will silently think to herself: “ZING!”
The doctor tags out, my wife enters the ring and we go another round about truth and half-truths, my nostrils flaring furiously.
We’re getting nowhere, which is to say, I’m winning, and perhaps maybe, just maybe, saving myself from a fitbit 5000 monitored diet. If I win, I am most definitely going to the grocery store for a 4 pack of ice cream in celebration – naturally.
Time really is running out, and the doctor’s nurse has slipped her a note about a patient with the flu.
The doctor starts to wrap up, but she leaves us with a parting-shot. She quickly pulls up google again and starts typing again “j-a-s-o-n-space-b-a-k-e-r-space-5-space-y-e-a-r-space-g-p-s-space-h-e-a-t-m-a-p-space-n-e-a-r-space-g-r-o-c-e-r-y”.
At first, as I watch the doctor type, the pure geek in me will be curious what new google feature my doctor has found, I won’t be able to control my geek and I’ll start asking the doctor questions rapid-fire: what this will be and where she heard about this and so on, but before I’ve even started, she’ll click “i’m feeling lucky”.
And there it will be. A heat map of my favorite grocery store. You know the type, like a crime heat map where areas with no coloration indicate zero crime, green indicates non-zero crime, and bright-red indicates the-wire-style gentrification is around the corner? Right, that kind of map.
The grocery store map will naturally show a bright red area around the registers and the front doors, a token amount of green in the veggie aisle, but there in the middle, slightly more red than my face, will be what we all knew would be there: bright red lines from front door through the candy aisle and ice cream aisle.
The last thing I’ll remember will be my headset’s speakers clipping out from the sheer ferociousness of my wife’s instinctive tirade she’ll launch without pause, and then I’ll click the ‘hangup’ icon.
Don’t worry. I’ll go out for one last four-pack of ice cream anyway.
And that’s how I will become the four-pack-ice-cream guy on the hit tv show ‘americas funniest physicals’.
