Kevin’s a Funny Guy: Dumb Logic

Today Kevin had a rough day. He doesn’t like hills (or more literally mountains) and heat. We had both in large doses today. All morning was spent going 1200 meters up hill and the rest of the day was spent going up and down smaller hills. All that climbing was done in 43 degrees Celsius heat according to one temperature display in one of the towns. However I’m not so sure the display was very trustworthy since it had the wrong time. I’m thinking it was more like 35 degrees Celsius. Either way Kevin was dying of heat exhaustion (wimp, I was doing fine by the way). If he’s finding this hot then I don’t think he’ll be liking Iran or Turkmenistan very much. Suffice it to say, Kevin didn’t have a good day and was in a grumpy mood.

At a gas station just after coming down from the 1200 meter climb. Which, by the way, gets Kevin really mad: why go all that way up only to go all the way down again? Anyways, at the gas station Kevin noticed that my GPS was showing a distance of ~50km rather than >60km which is what he’d thought we’d actually cycled so far that day. Well he was correct as I was having GPS problems earlier in the day and accidentally turned off the logging function on the GPS and didn’t record the 10km or so of downhill cycling we did that morning.

I had noticed my mistake earlier but didn’t say anything to Kevin knowing that he’d probably flip out or something. Yes, it sucks that I missed recording 10km of our cycling, but it was bound to happen. This was my first screw-up of this kind so far. In 15000+ km of cycling I’ve now missed 10km. All in all I think that’s an okay record. Also my GPS tends to think we are sometimes moving even though we are stationary (like when we are between tall buildings where the reception is bad). So it records distances we haven’t actually done. Therefore, I think it all works itself out in the end. I told Kevin as much but he didn’t care and flipped out saying that he wanted a perfect distance recording and that I should manually add in the 10km. I, not about to waste my time with what essentially amounts to a minor rounding error, was also not going to waste my time listening to him spew his dumb logic. I put on my headphones and pumped up the volume, leaving him yelling into the wind. Which, by the way, also gets Kevin mad: wind, heat and hills are not Kevin’s idea of a good time.

As we left the gas station with him still yelling, I was reminded of another instance where he applied his dumb logic. During a bicycle tour we did some years ago from Singapore to Tokyo we were in Japan and about to head into a Manga Kissa for the night. Up until this point we had done cycled at least 100km every day. This was according to a little odometer attached to Kevin’s bicycle (we didn’t have a GPS on this trip). On this day, however, we had stopped at the Toyota headquarters and checked out the museum; therefore, we only ended up cycling ~98km. Kevin wanted to keep the 100km streak alive so he applied some of his dumb logic. He started cycling around the parking lot to rack up two more kilometers on the odometer while I stood there yelling at him to stop being an idiot. How is cycling around the parking lot going to accomplish anything? It gets you no closer to Tokyo. In the end he actually ended up hitting 100km on the day. So while we both reached the same destination that day Kevin did it in 100km while I did it in 98km.

If I were him and intent on hitting 100km, instead of cycling around the parking lot, I would have just flipped the bike over and spun the front wheel. Kevin, though, likes to do things the dumb way.