Two hours stuck below a 500-pound four wheeler made me get a Carbinox watch.
01. The day
The four-wheeler rolled on the slope and I went under it
My name is Dale Mercer. I run cattle on a place forty minutes from the nearest town in central Montana, with my wife Carol and a border collie named Buck. Most days it is me, Buck and the four-wheeler. That morning I was checking a fence line on the north pasture, same as a thousand mornings before, and the ground gave on a wet slope. The machine came over on top of me and pinned my right leg against a rock.
My phone was in my chest pocket. I could feel it against my ribs. I could not get an arm to it. I tried for what felt like an hour. Then I just lay there and waited for Carol to notice I was late for lunch. Buck never left my side, which I appreciated, but he is no good on a phone.
Carol found me a little over two hours later. The leg was fine, in the end. The two hours were not, and they followed me home.
02. What it did to me
I started thinking about it every single time I went out
You do not go back to normal after that. Every time I saddled up or climbed on the machine, I was doing math. How far from the house. Who knows where I am. How long until somebody comes looking.
Carol started texting me every hour. I started answering every hour. That is not how you run a ranch, and it is not how I wanted to live. I needed a way to make a call with my hands full, my arm pinned, or my phone somewhere I could not get to.
So I did what everybody does. I went and bought the one named after a fruit. Six hundred dollars for a fruity watch. That turned out to be the first of two mistakes.
03. What I tried first
A $600 watch that died by three o'clock
Six hundred dollars. It did make calls, I will give it that. It also needed charging every night, and I forget. Twice in the first month I looked down in the afternoon and it was dead. A dead watch does not make calls.
Three weeks in, it caught a gate latch and the screen spidered. The store told me the warranty covers defects, and a gate is not a defect. So I tried a sixty dollar one off Amazon next. It lost the connection to my phone every time I walked to the barn.
Two watches, over six hundred and fifty dollars, and I was no safer than the day the machine rolled on me. Then one night an ad from Carbinox came up on Facebook that I almost scrolled past.
04. Why I almost did not buy this one
Lifetime Warranty at this price? Sounded like a scam
The Carbinox Edge. Calls from the wrist, two weeks on a charge, Gorilla Glass, and Carbinox would replace it for life if it broke. For a fraction of what the fruity one cost. I figured it was too good to be true, because everything else had been.
What got me to keep reading was the number. Four hundred thousand of these on wrists already. You do not sell four hundred thousand of anything that is junk, not with the internet the way it is. The reviews were from guys like me. Mechanics, welders, a man who runs a wrecker. Not one of them was talking about apps. They were talking about what it survived.
I read the warranty page before I read the features page. That is how I buy. It said, in plain words: if your Edge ever fails, we send you a new one. Free. No expiration. Then there was a forty-five day window to send it back for a full refund if I did not like it, with a prepaid label.
So the worst case was I wasted a little time. I pulled the trigger on the black one. Four days later there was a box on the porch, and I was ready to be disappointed.
05. The day it showed up
Heavier than I expected, and I mean that as a compliment
First thing I noticed was the weight. It feels like a tool, not a toy. Steel case, a strap wide enough for a working wrist, and glass that does not flex when you press on it. The screen was bright enough to read on the porch at noon.
In the box: the watch, a spare screen protector, the charger and a couple of extras I was not expecting. I paired it to my phone in the kitchen with the app in a couple of minutes. Carol tried it on, looked at the price on the box again, and said there had to be a catch.
I thought so too. The next morning was when I found out whether there was.
06. The first week
Took the first call in the saddle
Doc Halvorsen, our vet, called while I was horseback, and I answered it on my wrist without touching the phone in my pocket. Talked to her through the watch, clear as the phone. Did not even stop the horse.
The battery was the second surprise. I charged it the Sunday it arrived and did not think about it again until the next weekend. That is the whole fight with the $600 one, gone.
A good first week does not prove anything. Ninety days of mud, gates and creek crossings is where the last two watches died. Here is how this one did.
07. Ninety days later
Carol stopped texting every hour
Three months in, here is where I am. The watch has been through mud, a creek crossing, two gate latches and a drop off the tailgate onto gravel. Not a mark on the glass. It has not lost the phone once walking to the barn.
I have taken calls with a calf under one arm. I have called the house from the tractor with both hands on the wheel. And the day the truck got stuck in the creek bottom, I called Ray Buckley, our neighbor, from my wrist while I was waist deep in water, because my phone was on the seat and I was not. Two minutes. Not two hours.
Carol does not text every hour anymore. She knows if something happens, I can reach her with whatever hand is free. That is what the watch bought me. The watch is just how it comes.
Rated Excellent 4.6 out of 5
