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My Irish Catholic family had numerous superstitions. One of them was that of giving a "bad eye" to something. Basically, this meant that if you said something good about something, this was tempting fate and it would immediately turn bad. So you were only able to make pejorative or at best neutral proclamations about things in general. I did not subscribe to this theory, but a recent event seems to prove me wrong.
I was commuting home, and I happened to notice my cyclocomputer. I was thinking what an extremely reliable device it was, since, despite its low cost, it had lasted many years. Most of my other cyclocomputers have trouble turning over triple digits (perhaps this is related to my always buying the cheapest ones available). But this one, a Vetta Innovator (no longer made for quite some time) had turned over 10,000 miles and was well into the second 10,000. So I was thinking what a good, reliable accessory it was. Bad move.
The very next day, I got home and checked my mileage. Despite the fact I have these cyclocomputers on all my bikes, I basically don't trust them. They will occasionally suffer brain damage, or the pickup will get knocked out of place, etc, so every day I check my reading against yesterday's to see if the difference looks reasonable. After all, we don't want some interloper to surpass me in the Mileage Wars because of some data error. So the day after my blissful ruminations about this wonderful computer, I checked the odometer and it read 417 miles. This was a bit alarming, considering it had read over four thousand the day before. Now I could have understood if it had reset itself to zero, but to some arbitrary low number? I began to suspect evil forces at work. Given its years of faithful service, I decided to give it another chance. Next day, it registered no miles at all, next day it gave what looked like a correct reading, next day nada, so in the end I decided to retire it, with great sadness.
So now I've got a really nasty one that seems extremely unreliable, and I would be surprised if it lasted the summer. Really.
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