I’m adventuring quicker than I can write at the moment so this one is about the trouble I got myself into two weekends ago. I hope that it makes you smile and makes you feel better if you struggle with some forms of modern technology, you are not the only one!
Generally, I am quite good at working stuff out. I work on a PC all day, have lots of gadgets and really do think technology is marvellous most of the time. However, I got myself in such a tizz with it this particular weekend and got into trouble with the one person who you do not want to get into trouble with ……….. my mother! What did I do?
Well in short, I went for a lovely bike ride on the Kirklees Way. It was one of those Sunday mornings when I could have done all my jobs and housework but I thought they can wait until tomorrow, I’m off on a bike ride. I will however admit to taking the electric mountain bike. My legs were so tired with lots of running as I am training for a race at the end of March. From my house to Kirkburton and back on the Kirklees Way it’s 33 miles or 53km and it is very hilly so I had a bit of battery powered assistance for the hills. You still have to work hard on an electric bike. Some people think it’s cheating, but it’s still quite a workout for 53km.
It’s a lovely ride as it is almost all off road through woods, across fields and down farm tracks with some lovely views. It was one of those dry crisp days with a very moody sky but fortunately it stayed dry. The first part across the fields is lovely.
Then you come into the very lovely village of Upper Denby……..and what is located there?!? Only the best ice cream parlour in the area which makes its own ice cream from its own dairy herd. So, what did I have?
I bet you guessed wrong! Yes, for the very first time in my life I went to an ice cream parlour and did not have an ice cream. It was Sunday morning, I was frozen and I just needed a bacon sandwich and some caffeine.
So once I’d fuelled it was off again for the remainder of the ride. It was a super ride and the first time I have done it in its entirety. Under railway viaducts, through woods and past the sweetest little pony which I just had to stop and pet.
However, it all went slightly downhill when I got home and discovered my technology issue and the dozen missed calls from my mother!
You see I have one of those new fitness watches now I’m a ‘competitive athlete’! I say this as a joke because I use only 3 things on it, distance, speed and elevation. I have no interest whatsoever in all the other fancy stuff it does like cardio statistics, cadence, oxygen saturation etc. But they just don’t make anything simple these days do they, everything has to be so overcomplicated. Now I have to admit I’ve never really sat down and set anything up on this watch. I’ve sort of fiddled with and amended settings as they’ve annoyed me. Like when I sit still for more than 5 minutes at work and it tells me to move…….I rapidly disabled that! I did the same for the ‘relax’ warning because I don’t do ‘relax’, I’m wasting adventuring time if I’m relaxing, I feel guilty, like I’m missing an opportunity.
Anyway, I suspected something may have gone slightly wrong with my new fandangled watch when I checked my work out on Strava when I got back. My 33 mile very tiring workout had recorded 38 seconds of the ride with zero distance and 1 calorie burned……..so not even enough for the bacon sandwich. It had then published it on Strava and attracted comments from my running club friends along the lines of, “Some bloody workout that!”
However, if that wasn’t bad enough, I then discovered all the missed calls from my mother demanding I ring her ‘IMMEDIATELY’ ‘to let her know I was ok, the first one received four hours previous. Apparently, my watch has an inbuilt incident detection alert, which monitors your GPS activity for sudden stops and impacts and then notifies contacts that you may be in trouble, via SMS text message. Now I do vaguely remember putting my mother’s landline number in as my next of kin when I first got the watch, along with that of my eldest son but did not really pay attention as to why. Well, I now know that when you go down a very bumpy track at speed on a mountain bike, the sudden impact detected by my GPS, alerts my mother that I’ve been in an incident and am in trouble! What’s worse is that it does this every hour until I disable it. To say she was worried by the time I contacted her four hours later is understatement of the year and I was in more trouble than I’ve been in for a long time. At the opposite end of the spectrum was the text from my son which said “I’ve received an incident alert on my phone, I’m sure you’ll be ok, ring if you need me!”. I did point out that the whole point of the system was to summon help because if I’d had an incident, I might not be able to call him.
So, I quickly attempted to disable it and took her out of my contacts thinking that was job done. But no! I then got a call on Monday after work, a whole day later, from her mobile to advise me that, “Your Dad had had to unplug the landline phone because that watch of yours is still calling us every hour!!”. Anyway, to cut a long story short I’ve disabled the feature altogether as I’ve decided that lying in a ditch injured until someone finds me is a better option than being in trouble with my mother.
So, if you have issues with some forms of modern technology, don’t stress, it happens to those of us that are supposedly quite ‘with it’ when it comes to technology. I do however, strongly recommend turning the incident detection facility off on your watch if descending a bumpy track on a bike!