THE ON-HOLD WORKOUT: WEIGHT LOSS THROUGH MUZAC

I have just come up with a sure fire way to lose weight AND keep those ever-so-unhealthy stress levels low! It’s such a great idea that I am thinking it should be patented, or trademarked, or whatever people do with great ideas that they want to be eternally credited for. I should probably google this subject… Oops… I digress… My great idea is:

THE ON-HOLD WORKOUT: WEIGHT LOSS THROUGH MUZAC

For those of you who don’t know what ‘muzac’ is… when the phone company tells you that your call is important to them and then immediately begins playing an instrumental version of Don’t Stop Believin’… you are listening to muzac. In general terms, muzac is something that used to be music but has been twisted into the auditory version of waterboarding.

Muzac is the corporate way of saying “F%#$! You” to all the people who pay money to them… without actually saying “F%#$! You”. It’s like when your mother-in-law babysits and fills the kids with sugar and lets them stay up a gazillion hours past bedtime. She knows that she’s saying “F%#$! You” and you definitely hear “F%#$! You” but to everyone else, it’s just an instrumental version of Don’t Stop Believin’. Hmmm… I think I digressed again…

So back to my topic… THE ON-HOLD WORKOUT: LOSING WEIGHT THROUGH MUZAC. Note: I was put on hold many, many, MANY times today… and yesterday… and the day before… so my grip on reality may be a tad fragile.

So the day before yesterday, while I was on hold with Sears Canada and listening to an excellent rendition of Queen’s We are the Champions but played with pan flutes (and possibly a hint of accordion), I started getting a little fidgety, so I began bopping my head back and forth a bit.  Then I got up off my chair and started to do a little back and forth with the legs. Then the muzac switched to an excellent xylophone version of the theme song from the movie Arthur. And suddenly I was dancing.

Well, maybe not dancing. More like a kind of line dancing meets Zumba sort of thing, but still very aerobic. And that’s when it hit me…

WHAT IF I DANCED MY WAY THROUGH EVERY ON-HOLD SITUATION?

So I went with it. And guess what?!? By the end of the day before yesterday, I had clocked almost an hour of full-on cardio!!! Thank you to Sears Canada and the Toronto-Dominion Bank and Eastlink Cable and the Westjet Vacations group.  

Yesterday was even better! I decided to add ‘conference calls’ to my list of dance-situations (because 99.9% of the time I don’t actually do anything on conference calls except listen to people drone on about stuff that has very little to do with me, which is sort of like muzac without instruments… like the muzac version of performance art!).

So yesterday, I clocked closer to 90 minutes. Seriously!!! (You can’t make this shit up).

Today, I didn’t have a single phone meeting and still hit 35+ minutes! Thank you to Microsoft Online Support and VISA and Eastlink Cable (again!). Left my office feeling pretty impressed with myself and totally satisfied that I was keeping my New Year’s resolution to ‘get in shape’. And with the $50 that I saved on a monthly gym membership, I was able to buy 2 bottles of a moderately priced merlot AND 3 peppermint brownie cake pops from Starbucks.