Not inexpensive merchendise, just cheap junk

Now I remember why I never got a scooter before Thursday. It's not because I did not have the money available, and not because I had rollerblades and my bicycle already, but rather the words of warning from a friend of mine. He told me of when he worked in the San Fransisco (novelty store) warehouse in Edmonton. There was always a pile of returned scooters. Very cheap, very unreliable scooters piled as a monument to the incompetent design of them. I was told that it was a very bad idea to ever purchase one.

This is something I learned the hard way. I did notice that the wheels got quite warm when used for a certain period of time, like 20 minutes.
To the left we see what the wheel should look like, more or less, and to the right we see what happened to the wheel after I was riding it for 21 minutes today. I do not know exactly how long I was riding for, but it was from our apartment to downtown, which took about 20 minutes, and it resulted in failure of the rear wheel. The reason I came downtown was to pick up Caitlin from work, which I was early for. So I sat down and decided to read the information that was on the bottom of the scooter, to see if there was some kind of warning about the wheels. No such luck, but there were warnings about using it for stunting and taking it into traffic. And a weight limit of 80 kg/ 175 lbs. Uh oh. Should have read that before I bought it, since I balance the scales at 190 lbs. Did that contribute to the failure? Probably. All the same I'm going to dig up the receipt and return it. Finding the receipt might be a bit of a chore though.

On a happy note, Caitlin and I used our gift certificate that we got from the LDSSA for our help with Friday Forum last semester. I know that it was Sunday, and you are not supposed to do shopping or the like on the sabbath day. When you have to work on Sunday, it really skews things in your head. So after I picked up Caitlin, we went to Second Cup and redeemed the $10 certificate for a strawberry smoothie and a piece of Hugs and Kisses cake. The cake was layered with chocolate brownie and vanilla cheesecake. One word, tasty!