Cool and Interesting

I’m going on a long winter bike ride today. My husband would like to be reassured for the next three hours that I am ok. He would like me to take “his” pebble along. This worked great when we wanted to find our luggage in the airport and someone had taken it off the conveyor belt. But I don’t really like being tracked.

The Pebblebee is an excellent product for tracking. The battery is long-lasting and the app easy to use.

When our daughter was on an out-of-country trip she didn’t have to worry about needing to ensure her internet connection in order to keep us up to date. However, when she didn’t seem to be moving after her airplane had landed though … there was nothing much we could do but worry. It turned out that the Uber they had ordered didn’t show up.

Other cyclists also talk about having to let their wives know what they’re up to. I would like to not worry that my husband has fallen and become unconscious on one of his long trail runs up and down the steep mountains too.

But is it a real risk reduction tool?

What could be the reasons for:

• No signal: the battery running out, malfunction, entering neighboring countries’ internet space.
• No movement: the tracker has fallen out of the bag at a break, the rider has fallen asleep on the beach, lunch became a 4-course event.

What can a spouse do and why? In the first place they’d like to be reassured that all is well, so they can phone. If the phone goes unanswered, then at what point do they call search and rescue?

In the happy flow case, the tracking spouse can virtually and vicariously enjoy the trip of the rider/runner. The spouse being tracked doesn’t have to stop as often and take pictures of locations to send to the family chat (though I like to do that anyways).

The cost is that the spouse being tracked is now intrinsically responsible for ensuring that the tracker is sending out the right signal. So instead of taking pictures, I would have to look at my screen, for which I have to take off my sunglasses, deal with an app, and reduce the feeling of untethered enjoyment.

The chances that the tracking spouse would save the life of the tracked spouse is very very small. In case of a serious accident during a bike trip, the ambulance would already have arrived. The unconscious spouse who’s fallen in a steep mountain valley … ?

So it’s about managing how much risk the spouse may take on their own, balancing the responsibility of the away-from-home spouse with the reassurance of the at-home spouse.

How do you resolve this balance? How do you manage the risk appetite of the involved parties?