Open-Casket Viewing Ruined After Deceased's Fitbit Buzzes Mid-Service

An open-casket viewing at Parkside Memorial Chapel was disrupted Saturday afternoon when the deceased's Fitbit Charge 6 issued an audible 'Time to Stand!' reminder at 2:47 p.m., approximately forty minutes into the service. The device, which funeral home staff had neglected to remove during preparation, vibrated against the satin casket lining with enough force to produce a sound one attendee described as 'deeply, fundamentally upsetting.' The deceased, Harold Fenwick, 71, had been an avid step-counter in life, consistently achieving his daily 10,000-step goal until approximately seventy-two hours before the viewing. The Fitbit, still synced to his phone via Bluetooth, had continued sending inactivity alerts throughout the embalming process. 'I was mid-sentence in my reading from Ecclesiastes,' said Reverend Patricia Holm. 'There's a time to be born and a time to die, and then Harold's wrist buzzed and honestly I lost my place.' Three attendees gasped. One elderly woman fainted briefly. Harold's grandson, a philosophy student at DePaul University, reportedly stood and asked whether the alert constituted evidence of an afterlife, sparking a five-minute debate that Reverend Holm described as 'not appropriate for the venue but surprisingly well-argued.' Funeral director Marcus Webb apologized and removed the device. 'In thirty years, I've dealt with phones ringing in caskets, pacemakers causing issues during cremation, and one incident involving an Alexa,' he said. 'But this is the first time a dead man has been told to stand up by his own wrist.' Fitbit's parent company, Google, issued a statement: 'We are exploring a firmware update that detects prolonged inactivity beyond normal parameters.' The family has requested that Harold's step count -- 4,712,339 lifetime steps -- be engraved on his headstone.