Watch It

My Fitbit stopped working a few weeks ago. I purchased that one in April of the first year of Covid after my other one fell off my wrist while walking. Hence, I had that Fitbit for just over three years. I am not sure why, but a few weeks ago the screen only partially lite, and it would not reset. I purchased a new watch, but instead of a Fitbit, I purchased a Garmin. The Garmin was going fine from the date I received it on June 6, 2023 until the evening of June 15. What I realized during the evening of June 15 is that I have to watch it.

Part of my nightly routine to attempt to solve the continued pain in my feet involves, as one recommendation of a PA, soaking in ice cold water for 30 seconds and warm water for three minutes. I have always asked Alexa to provide the three minute time. My wife suggested I set a timer on my new watch. Well, I hit an extra zero, giving me 30 minutes and not three, and somehow, I got that cleared up to a second. After one second the timer went off and kept vibrating and a message about how the time is complete. I tried to swipe the watch face, and hit one and then the other of the buttons, but it kept doing that. Of course, by that time my three minute soak of feet in warm water was well up.

Garmin, Vivo 4S
Source: Google images. (Not my wrist)

My wife contacted our oldest son, who has a Garmin and we faced time. Swiping the face, I could get a screen, but that went away quickly. What solved the problem was holding the on/off button for 15 seconds waiting and restarting the watch. Who would ever think it would take 15 seconds to turn off a watch? It later occurred to me, the watch is like a small computer. When I have computer trouble, the first thing I do is turn it off, sometimes with a hard shutdown by holding the start button for about ten seconds. Problem solved, but I still do not know what led to the problem in the first place. 

However, the next morning, I noticed another problem. My wife had an appointment at 7 am, only five minutes from our house. She said goodbye and I looked at my watch and it was reading 6:30, so I wondered why she was leaving so early. I looked at the timer on the microwave and it said 6:47. Now I had to figure why my time was off. It is synched to my phone and that did not seem to work. I found that I had to go outside and get satellite connection for an activity like biking or hiking. It took a while to obtain a GPS signal due to cloud and tree cover. But, that did the trick.

My new watch has many features, that I am not sure how to use, and perhaps on some dreary rainy day, I will look more in-depth at the manual. Heck, I may even figure out how to use the timer correctly. One feature set up on my watch is that it will receive text messages. If I use GPS while biking I have it set not to receive a text. However, it is another thing for my wife to complain about when I drive, is looking at the text received on my watch face. It is now another feature added to the wife app. The thing is I receive very few text messages, so it is not a big deal. 

The thing is I am not sure who was more upset about the watch buzzing, me with a new watch that was buzzing and would not go back to the main screen, or my wife being upset with me being upset at the watch. Technology can be useful and helpful, but can cause more stress when things do not go well.  In fact, my wife was looking at the manual and suggested that I use the stress setting on the Garmin. Because I had the watch off my wrist with the buzzing, I could not see what score it gave me for stress. The day my watch buzzed, a number of government computer servers were hacked, so I guess that could be worse than what I had to face. I just need to watch it.