This just goes to show you. If you observe the golden rule, pay it all forward, and stop beating your wife, good things will happen.<\/p>\n
My Garmin died the other day. For those of you unfamiliar with a it, a Garmin cyclocomputer records everything about your bike ride: speed, distance, time, heart rate, power wattage, cadence and all manner of averages and maximums. Without it, you can\u2019t record your ride on Strava, the ride app. (Well, you can, but the phone app provides limited data.) And if it doesn\u2019t appear on Strava, as they say, it didn\u2019t happen.<\/span><\/p>\n Saturday morning the screen froze. The problem seemed to be the \u201center\u201d button wasn\u2019t working. Which meant I couldn\u2019t even factory reset it. I had to ride without it. Which meant, I couldn\u2019t know whether I was having a good time. Very disconcerting.<\/p>\n Being the weekend, I couldn\u2019t even call Garmin support after the ride. They\u2019re closed. What are those guys thinking? You would think, cyclists being a generally neurotic bunch, they’d have a 24-hour hotline to prevent us from hurting ourselves in these situations.<\/p>\n I stared at the frozen screen. It couldn\u2019t stay that way, I thought. It would certainly drain the battery. By Sunday morning, it did. But the \u201center\u201d button did not have that familiar soft click to it. I was able to power it up, though that took hours, leaving me in a distressed state of fear, uncertainty and doubt while it rejuvenated itself. Yet, even after it was fully charged, the \u201center\u201d button still didn\u2019t work. So I really couldn\u2019t do much. It was still an expensive paperweight, a light one at that.<\/p>\n On Sunday\u2019s ride, still no data. How much power was I generating? What was my cadence? Was my heart still beating? Same thing this morning. I would occasionally ask they guy riding next to me, \u201cHow fast we going?\u201d He was cruel, \u201cSlow,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Coming back to the house and my paperweight, I tried one more time. I powered it up. I was contemplating opening the back. My technical abilities are minimal. Which is to say, none. I wasn\u2019t sure what I\u2019d do if I got the back off. So I tried the enter button one more time.<\/p>\n It worked! The click is back! I could change screens. I could see averages, maximums, wattage, heart beats. I was alive! I took it for a test ride, and it worked flawlessly.<\/p>\n Maybe this is temporary. Maybe it\u2019s just playing with me. But I didn\u2019t do a thing but hope and pray. And my Garmin is back.<\/p>\n Maybe being such a kind and wonderful guy pays dividends. Even my friends assure me that\u2019s not the case. Maybe it was just dumb luck.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This just goes to show you. If you observe the golden rule, pay it all forward, and stop beating your wife, good things will happen. My Garmin died the other day. For those of you unfamiliar with a it, a Garmin cyclocomputer records everything about your bike ride: speed, distance, time, heart rate, power wattage,… Read More<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1970"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1971,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1970\/revisions\/1971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/griendling.com\/wordpress1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}