It's hard to say of this is more funny or annoying. It's both, though.

[xiphias]

So, Brian, the trainer I work with at the gym, has been wanting to get 65 pound dumbbells for a while now. And I'm the excuse he got to finally do so. (And, well, he paid for them himself out of his bonus check. . . )

They finally arrived, on the day when I was going to be doing dumbbell presses anyway, so I got to be the first person to use them, even before Brian got to try them out. So we started doing my set.

The first set was with the 55-pound dumbbells, and it went fine. My second set was with the 60-pounders, and it was, of course, more difficult, but still went fine. And for my third set, I got to try out the new 65-pounders. (That's 25 kilos, 27.2 kilos, and 29.5 kilos.)

And I just FLEW through that set. Brian said, "Wow. It looked like you were barely working at all harder than with the 60-pound dumbbells."

And I thought about it. And I picked up a 60-pound dumbbell in one hand, and a 65-pound one in the other. And I hefted them. And I handed them to Brian. Who also hefted them. And said, "No way. No fucking way."

So we went into the other room with the scale. And we weighed them. "No fucking way." So we went into the OTHER other room with the digital scale, just in case the first scale was being weird.

Nope.

Turned out that the 65-pound dumbbells weighed 62.5 pounds.

And the 60-pound dumbbells weighed . . . 62.5 pounds.

Brian's comment was, "How do you even screw that up? This thing has absolutely no function OTHER than to weigh sixty-five pounds."

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The sixties and the sixty-fives ARE by different manufacturers, but that shouldn't matter. As Brian said, "Sixty. Five. Pound. Weight. It's right there in the NAME. Which of those words didn't they understand?"

[seventorches.livejournal.com]

So is the 60 pound. So, two different manufacturers screwed up two different weights and arrived at the same result?!

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yup. One was exactly halfway UP to the next weight they manufactured, and one was exactly halfway DOWN to the next weight they manufactured. One was 2.5 pounds heavy, one 2.5 pounds light. As these things are manufactured in 5-pound increments, that really does seem like a fairly large error.

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

You should double-check the colors on the middle of the dumbbells. I suspect you got the blue-green-black-silver and not the blue-green-black-violet.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Is this a serious reference to something I don't know about exercise weights, or a humorous reference to something entirely different that I know nothing about?

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

Humorous reference to resistor color codes. The last band indicates the tolerance. Silver is +/- 10%; violet is +/- 0.01%. (And blue-green-black is 65.)

And resistors kinda look like dumbells.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Suspected something like that. Naw; my electrical engineering is limited to I installed a couple light fixtures once. All I know about electricity is 1) make sure the circuit breaker is off before you do anything, and 2) the white wire goes to the white wire, the black wire goes to the black wire, and the green wire goes to ground.

[metahacker.livejournal.com]

Well, you cracked up wispfox...