Garmin ForeRunner 405 Causes Woman to Fly Into Murderous Rage

Lurch gave me a Garmin Forerunner 405 sometime in the spring of 2009. I should never have agreed to be Lurch's girlfriend, we were better off as friends. But I was out of my mind with heartache when I decided to try. I thought maybe I needed a man who wasn't interesting and exciting. Lurch was neither. Predictable and mechanical, he works like one of those oil drilling machines near Bakersfield. Up, down, up down, get the oil, up, down, here is my oil, in a rhythmic fashion with a very predictable yield. Sex was similar which is why we only had it once, and even that single episode lasting eight minutes and thirty two point five seconds brought my dinner up to my throat.

Lurch likes to measure everything, a pastime that makes him delightfully happy and which I hate with a screaming passion. The ForeRunner 405 he gave me with such high expectation that I would love it, was like wearing Big Ben on my wrist. It was supposedly genious enough to tell me how far, how fast, where, when, what and how I was doing every single second of whatever physical activity I was engaged in. I didn't even take it out of the box for two months because I knew I would hate it. I just want a watch with maybe two buttons at most. A start/stop button and a button to reset it is plenty for me to manage.

Lurch also gave me a hanging toiletry bag because he had one made my the Swiss Army people and I coveted it because the bottles all stood up straight inside of it and you could tell which was the shampoo and which was your lotion and it had lovely little toothbrush holders. But he gave me a cheap one he found at a sidewalk sale which was just a lousy excuse for a toiletry bag and I just resented him for it. And he gave me a car cover because he had one and his main priority aside from measuring every inch and every detail of his daily runs was keeping his car clean at all times. I hated this thing he paid $500.00 for because it took forever to unfold and secure onto my car which didn't mind being dirty. I didn't mind either and I always had better things to do than wrestle a car cover over my car at 6PM when I got home from work and was ravenously hungry and annoyed with pretty much everything including Lurch.

I had passive agressive responses to these gifts that Lurch so proudly gave me. He called every night at exactly 8:00PM and his first question was, "Have you learned how to use your Garmin yet?" And I took a fiendish sort of delight in replying, "No...I couldn't carve out the four and a half hours it would take to learn how to use it today and I've used up all my vacation time. Maybe in a couple of years when I'm done with life as I now know it, I will take it out of the box and read the manual which requires a degree in computer science."

Besides, I was not sure I liked him enough to accept a gift worth over $300.00 especially if I wasn't planning on sleeping with him, and spent a lot of time dreaming up reasons why I could not sleep with him. In fact, that is where most of my vacation time was spent, and I came up with brilliant reasons for why I could not have sex with him. But I digress...

When he asked if I was using the car cover, I told him my car preferred a heavy coating of grit and mud since she was a tough girl and not a sissy who was afraid of a little dirt.

So anyway, I finally took the ForeRunner out of the box after about two months as I said. It was so complicated to understand that I cried and had a tantrum right in front of an elementary school trying to use it for the first time. I had only about 40 minutes to go for a run and I spent about 32 minutes trying to pull up all the right menus using the watch's bezel. I think I dropped to the sidewalk in tears and cast a spell upon Lurch in that moment.

When the ForeRunner did work, it often gave me information I did not want. If I ran for two and half hours on hilly terrain, I wanted it to tell me I burned 6,000 calories because it sure felt like I burned enough to justify three martinis and half a chocolate cake. Instead, it would tell me I only ran ten miles and burned 600 calories. Again, on the sidewalk on my back sobbing and cursing Lurch for giving me this horrid device.

On long bike rides, it would go blank in the midst of what was intended to be an 80 mile ride. I was then left to my imagination which is not particularly concerned with being precise; it prefers to embellish based upon perceived effort. The ForeRunner was supposed to measure distance and time, but would decide it did not want to measure these elements on a particular day and would decide instead to beep every time I turned left or right and would tell me how far away I was from San Bernardino. In century rides, it would quit for no apparent reason, or freeze which made me furious. When I couldn't have the most essential data, I became very anxious and realized in these moments that it was all Lurch's fault that I was becoming like him.
I decided to call Garmin and lobby hard for a replacement or a simpler device which would not require an advanced degree in computer science. It turns out that the wait time was at least 45 minutes for customer service so I emailed instead. A representative named Aaron wrote me a two page email describing what he thought the problem was and how I could troubleshoot by plugging in the USB wireless transmitter and then making sure the watch was set to ANT+ settings. And then there was a long list of things I had to do to update the software and then go through the troubleshooting procedure. I became fatigued and felt my bloodsugar drop to dangerous levels when I read Aaron's list of procedures, so I emailed him and told him I would prefer to pay the $79.95 to have Garmin do all this stuff. He was resistant to this idea and encouraged me to take a week off from work to learn these procedures for updating the software and testing the device using my heartrate monitor and engaging in activities I would normally use the watch for. This would have required a prescription for a benzodiazapene and additional medical insurance in case a had a stroke while cursing my way through this procedure so I emailed him again begging him for the address to the repair department. He emailed back and told me this was a complicated procedure because of the distance between the repair department and the financial department. The repair department is apparently in Kansas and the financial department is in Norway, and the two don't communicate other than by steamship. So my check for the repair would have to be sent to Norway via Iceland and when received, they would send an albatross to Kansas with verification that my check had been processed. Then the Kansas repair team would immediately fly into action to repair the device and would ship it back to me via Volkswagen to California since devices shipped by air tend to mess with the settings. I also told Aaron that the watchband had broken and would need a new pin. He informed me that this would be a simple matter of sending away for a new pin to Thailand for an addition $19.95 shipping not included. I should receive my device back by Christmas of 2012 at which point, I would need to send it back to Kansas to update the software again.

Lurch spends his life doing stuff like this which is why I grew more and more intolerant of him. It was simply a match made in Hell, that's all. His job, for which is highly overpaid, is to measure race courses and order Porta-Potties and he has it down to a science. He never tires of running his same route day in and day out with his Garmin measuring each and every step and he delights in knowing that he shaved off .00045 seconds off his time from last Wednesday.

I left Lurch and took the ForeRunner with me, but I wish I hadn't. I returned the toiletry bag and the car cover though.