row row row your boat gently down the stream

28 Feb 2006 Man I'm getting fat! I should start dieting again :(
Maybe not eating that much pizza's would help too ;)

I was planning to do some cardio training today at the gym. I normally do 1 hour cycling and 30 minutes rowing. When I do powertraining I have a warmup session of 10 minutes rowing.

The gym has 3 rowing machines. 2 of those are the same brand and type and those are the ones I like best. They have a monitor mounted on them with all kinds of nerdy details about how bad I'm rowing.

Since december or so, one of the rowing machines broke down and the gym-people put a paper on it with "Monitor battery is empty. Rowing still works"
Well, tough luck right ? I still had the other machine.

Now we're 3 months later and the note is still attached to the rowing machine. Even worse, the other machine also broke down because of the same problem. And yet even worse: the last machine also broke down. Well isn't that a cats ass!

Last month (when only 1 machine broke down), I went up to the counter and asked if there were any plans to replace the batteries. The answer was that the battery was of some special type and that they had to order it and blabla.... but it would be fixed !

Well, I took the liberty of doing some research.

The machines are Concept2 Indoor Rower Model D with a PM3 Monitor.
The battery information sheet tells us that the monitor uses 2 D(IEC LR20) batteries.

This is what such a battery looks like:

[img_assist|fid=1017719|thumb=1|alt=6171_large.jpg]

Looks like your average off-the-shelf battery to me.
People should know better trying to fool me. Perhaps I'll complain...