The first mile

One of the Old Dominion Freight Line guys who live in Brookland devoted part of his day off Saturday to delivering our new treadmill.

We had shopping and other stuff to do on Saturday so we put off the assembly process until yesterday.

Maria proposed doing the work while the neighbors were at church so they wouldn't hear me screaming, "God damn! Fuck!" from the garage if things went south.

And they did, but only after we got the beast assembled.

We plugged it in, hit its reset/off switch and put in the key and nothing happened. No electrical hum, no lights on the console. Nada.

I followed all of the troubleshooting tips in the manual to no avail. Dejected, I decided to give up until I could call customer support this morning, have a few beers and watch Stormtrackers on the Discovery channel. (The IMAX cinematographer is an annoying whiner.)

I donned my wireless telephone headset this morning, went to the garage with manual in hand, and dialed the Proform customer service number and worked my way through the menus to reach Taren Christensen, aka Operator 88.

Taren walked me through the various scenarios and finally advised me to pop the hood on the motor assembly and look around for a loose wire. I removed the three screws, got down on my hands and knees and examined the power cord connections, then scanned the circuit board where I found a little red connector plug with white and black wires hovering above a matching socket on the motherboard. Oh-ho!

I made the connection, hooked up the power, flipped the reset switch and voila! The sucker fired right up and the console display came to life.

I thanked Taren profusely and wished her a splendid day out there in Logan, Utah, as I buttoned up the hood.

I then took the machine for a one-mile shakedown walk, covering the distance in a little more than 20 minutes and burning an estimated 105 calories.

So now I can go back to worrying about a bunch of Bush-hating sheep turning my country into Obamaland where only criminals have guns, infanticide is legal, we let Al Quaeda have the initiative again, and what little wealth I have gets spread around to dirtbags who work the welfare system instead of just work.