Overall, I’m really not one to complain (yeah, right), yet just when I was starting to think the guys at R&A weren’t all that bad, they go and act like a bunch of complete dickwads.
Considering the weather yesterday, I knew there wasn’t much chance I would go home after work and eagerly suit up to ride in the snow that had turned into rain once I climbed the stairs out of the subway station. Instead, I figured it was about time I stepped up to the financial plate and plunk down a few hundred on a decent trainer. After doing the reading and reading the research, I decided on the Blackburn Trakstand Ultra, a contraption which is neither fluid nor magnetic. Instead, it works on what Blackburn calls “centriforce.” I know, I know, this is all incredibly exciting, but at the end of the day, all “centriforce” really means is that the faster the housing spins, the harder a trio of steel ball bearings presses against a flywheel which presses against a friction compound plate which raises resistance.
Like I said, it’s terribly exciting.
Regardless, after plunking down three large (“large to me is $100) for this thing, I lugged it home on the bus and five minutes after stepping through my door, I began tearing open the box to get at my new toy. Immediately, I had a problem: the instructions were missing. Considering it was already past seven o’clock, calling R&A was out of the question as those jokers would have been gone for the evening. I tried calling anyway, but of course, no one answered the phone.
Determined to take my new trainer for a spin, I went online to Blackburn’s web site but the only instruction page/manual they have posted is one for a tire pump. And their customer service hours are 8-5 CST.
I was not only screwed. I was absolutely steaming. Leave it to the jackasses at R&A to sell their customers equipment without the proper instructions.
Regardless, the unit came out of the box 100% assembled, meaning a mildly intelligent chimp could probably figure out how to use it, although there are those times when you just want to make sure you’re doing something 100% right. For example, the unit came with three extra ball bearings and, based on what I had read in reviews, these were to be used to increase resistance. Looking down at the resistance housing, wanting to avoid pulling it apart without the proper background materials, having those instructions would have been grand.
After forty minutes or so, I hooked up my bike and got the thing going as I thought best which turned out to be good enough, but if I had had the instructions, I could have cut that time down to ten minutes. Remember that saying, time is money? Well, time is money, or at least I think of it that way.
For the longest time I had been thinking of investing in a trainer and I’m glad I did. Despite last night’s debacle, I now have the instructions as Blackburn’s customer service emailed them to me in less than five minutes after contacting them today after Al at R&A proved himself completely useless when we spoke. See dialogue below. Even without the instructions, though, the unit proved to work well as per the resistance. Since I’ve never used any other trainer, I can’t really speak to how quiet the thing is, but it seemed relatively quiet to me despite my downstairs neighbor banging on his ceiling/my floor, but he’s a cocksucker, so he deserves some noise anyway.
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R&A Dialogue
Phone ringing.
“R&A.”
“I bought a Blackburn trainer from you guys last night but there were no instructions in the box.”
“You want to bring it in and we’ll show you how to use it?”
“I was hoping I could stop in and you could just give me the directions.”
“If they weren’t in the box then it doesn’t come with directions.”
“Well could you look in another box to see if they might be in there and then maybe I can get a copy?”
“You’ll have to call me back later.”
Click. “Asshole.”
When your daddy owns the store, I guess you have some sort of a right to treat the customers like a bunch of tools.
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