The rowing machine has a subscription

Good morning. It rained here on Sunday afternoon and I spent an hour and a half in the garage looking for a box of my father's tools that I am now fairly sure my brother has had since 2011.

While I was in there I moved the rowing machine to get at a shelf. I bought it in 2019 and have used it, by a generous count, eleven times. This is relevant in about four paragraphs, though not in the way I expected when I sat down to write.

I said Monday. It is Tuesday. The statement took longer than the ten minutes I told you it would, which is the first finding.

Item 1 — what was on it

Nine recurring charges. I would have guessed four, and I would have said that with some confidence.

Two of them I could not identify from the descriptor at all and had to look up. One turned out to be the cloud storage on my phone, which doubled at some point without my noticing, presumably when the photographs from a deployment filled it up. The other was a trade publication I stopped needing in 2023 and have not opened since.

And there is a subscription attached to the rowing machine. Fourteen dollars and ninety-nine cents a month, since March of 2019, for a service that tracks workouts on a machine I have used eleven times. That is roughly thirteen hundred dollars, which I have checked twice because I did not believe it the first time.

Item 2 — apparently this is normal

I went looking afterwards for whether nine was a lot, mostly to make myself feel better, and the research is not comforting in either direction.

C+R Research asked people to estimate their monthly subscription spending off the top of their heads and got an average of eighty-six dollars. When the same people were then walked through the categories one at a time, the itemised total came to two hundred and nineteen. A separate survey by West Monroe put the share of consumers who underestimate at eighty-nine per cent, with two thirds of them out by more than two hundred dollars a month.

Those are survey figures from a few years back rather than anything with a statute behind it, so treat them as a shape rather than a measurement. The shape is that the guess and the total are not close, and that this is the ordinary condition rather than a failing.

The reason is structural and dull. Each charge is small enough on its own that it never rises to the level of a decision, and they arrive on different dates against different cards.

Item 3 — what I did about it

The trade publication is cancelled. It took four minutes and there was no argument, which I mention because I had braced for one.

The cloud storage I am keeping at the larger size, having looked at what is in it.

The rowing machine subscription is still running as I write this. I have the page open in another window. My reasoning, if you can call it that, is that cancelling it would settle the question of whether I am ever going to use the machine, and I have apparently been paying fifteen dollars a month for seven years to avoid settling that question.

The money meter

Freddie Mac PMMS, 27 Aug 2026. Federal Reserve, 29 Jul. BLS, 12 Aug.

Adjuster's note

Nothing on that statement was a fraud and nothing was hidden. Every one of the nine had my agreement behind it at some point, and the two I could not identify were both mine as soon as I looked them up. The gap was between what I had agreed to once and what I had noticed since.

The policy copy still has not arrived. Day eleven on the telephone call, which has now been going on longer than some of the claims I used to handle.

Tomorrow: the escrow account inside your mortgage payment, which changes every year without anybody writing to explain why.

Read the policy before you need it.
— Rita