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Fresh Korn: The lifeline
Ask me what was at the root of the most stressful afternoon I’ve had in a while and I’d, somewhat ashamed, have to say “The Blackberry.”
Even with some crazy life happenings of late, this past afternoon spent in a hotel room in France nearly put me under. What happened you ask? I’m not sure. IT caught a virus; a bug. A glitch in the software reared its ugly head. I downloaded another third-party application IT wasn’t happy with.
It hit the end of its lifespan. I looked at IT the wrong way when the temperature was 52 degrees and humidity was sitting at 73. Who knows what prompted it, but whatever it was, the puppy stopped working; froze up, death spiraled with the little ticking time bomb icon glaring at me from mid-screen. Roll the trackball one way or the other and there was movement, but push any button and the response was zip. A shortcut key on the side? Nada. The power button? Hah!
After a few hours of freaking out, pulling the battery and letting IT “rest” (can technology do this?), Googling possible causes, taking a break for a massage (yep, I’m still at a bike race), then coming back to the computer and eventually figuring out how to do a soft reset, I started to see an end to the tunnel. Then I tried to sync up with my computer to backup everything, in vain, and next made it over to our resident I.T. guy, Blake Caldwell’s laptop. Backed up no worries there. And then somehow I had access to a few keys; not all of them, mind you, but just enough to get to the reset screen.
After a couple of tense moments staring down the “are you sure you want to do this? Really! ARE YOU SURE?” screen before the master reset I hit the trackball and watched it happen. Everything… Gone. Then, after Blake nearly overwrote my backup file, catching it at the last second, we uploaded everything back on, restarted IT, and all was well. WTF?!?
All I know is that it works now and my blood pressure has dropped back to reasonably healthy levels (note: A day later however I sadly report that IT has now passed, and is being replaced with a shiny new one).
Sad, eh? Very.
Good friends of mine are probably laughing right now, wishing the damn thing had burst into flames, but for a cyclist on the road, and particularly one on Slipstream-Chipotle this season, the Blackberry is something of a lifeline. First, it’s like a security blanket that satisfies the incalculable insecurities that all of us have about being loved. You can always PIN or text somebody and feel a “connection” – how special!
Email is always there for you, arriving with a happy little chirp, loving you, holding you, telling you everything is going to be okay. And then the actual phone part of it – you can call someone, or even better, somebody could call you! Yep, sad, I know.
Functional as well for all of those same reasons; especially when you’re on the road, can’t for the life of you get the hotel WiFi you just paid an arm and a leg for to work, and your insurance company sends an email telling you that your house and cars are going to be repossessed if you don’t pay your premiums. With the handy little Blackberry that email arrives, and even that one enters the inbox with a happy little chirp.
More importantly, the Blackberry, for Slipstream-Chipotle, is how the Agency for Cycling Ethics (ACE) can find us at any moment of the day and spring the jolly news that you’re up for a collection shortly, and to either head to the lab or that they’ll be coming by for a test. ACE runs ours, and now a couple of other teams’ internal anti-doping and bio-marker profiling programs.
They test us roughly bi-weekly, both blood and urine, and over the course of the year have an extremely accurate profile of what’s happening in our bodies. While I’m not qualified, or smart enough, to really get into the details of what they do with the masses of data in their files, it does give ACE the ability to very quickly see when something is awry, then contact the team and have us thrown on the bench until things are resolved. Whether it’s something fishy, or simply somebody is sick enough to throw off their biomarkers out of a standard deviation from the norm – in which case you wouldn’t want to be racing anyways.
The ability to keep these tests random and sporadic gives them just another edge on anybody that might be crazy enough to try something stupid. The Blackberry enables this, and makes it so riders have NO excuse to miss a test. We both submit our whereabouts, keeping them updated on the fly if anything were to change, and can be reached any time they would want to surprise us … pretty handy, and with the repercussions for a missed test, very important to have working properly. I’m sure you’ve all read about ACE and what we’re doing these days trying to help restore a bit of faith in the top end of our sport, but if not hopefully that gives a little overview.
The Blackberry is also our little intra-team communication system. Everybody’s handset is updated daily with schedule and travel programs, and gives riders and staff who are currently spread out over three continents a direct line to one and other. For a team that has grown fairly dramatically over the past couple of seasons it’s something that had been discussed frequently and makes a huge difference now that the system is in place.
As for the team, Slipstream-Chipotle has started things well this year with squads currently racing in Qatar, the Bahamas, and in France. There has been a fantastic burst of press of late and it’s been exciting for all involved. Now it’s time to put some heads down and continue with our animating, aggressive racing style, keeping a solid patch of argyle at the pointy end of the races. Thanks to everybody for their support, and hopefully for those of you who’ve been wavering over the past few seasons we can provide a lifeline back into the sport, and one with a bit more meaning than that cursed Blackberry has to us riders …
