August 21, 2008

Not All Families Get Along

I am enjoying all the Olympic broadcasts. I am not going out and ordering a half dozen new cars but I may feel better about a 12 pack of diet coke and all the stuff we buy from the J&J family of companies.

We steer a ton of business the J&J family’s way. For example test strips.

It seems that they, like a lot of families, have some less functional members. By this I mean the One Touch branch of the family. Don’t get me wrong I still feel good about being a customer of someone who is bringing all the swimming races into our living room and a bunch of good people to FFL but maybe they could take a lesson from the events they beam into said living room.

Timing is everything - see Michael Phelps’s touch out in the fly. One one hundredth of a second did the deal. I think we can all be impressed with the time keeping ability needed to correctly identify the winner.

Time matters. Unless you are one touch.

One touch isn’t exactly in the same class as the Olympic Games when it comes to timing. Our meters seem to stray off time about as fast the US Swimmer set worlds records. In other words - all the time. I have flat out given up trying to keep them in line and on time.

Time isn’t the only place this member of the clan seems to be off on its own. The $200 Ping meter is another case in point. (Any bets on if a $200 meter keeps time better than a free one? No. Wonder why not.) Animas went out of their way to make the 2020 bright readable color. One touch made the Ping meter dull unreadable monochrome.

There were clear undercurrents of Us vs Them when we asked about this at the combined One Touch / Ping booth at Friends for Life. As in go ask ‘THEM’ head jerking toward the One Touch side of the display booth why the meter has that screen. Clearly the issue had come up and the Animas and One Touch branches of the family had different views on viewable screens.

One Touch also demonstrated it is a bit of out of touch when it came to Mini’s too. For one thing they are not really particularly small. Hey One Touch - how about a meter in a strip can cap like a SideKick? That would rock.

We have two kids with Type 1. Telling the meters apart comes in handy for tracking who numbers are what. Even if you can’t trust the clock in the meter for when tests were done, knowing which meter is who’s helps. Color is a handy little feature in this regard. Yes Minis come in colors. (Grown up meters like Ultras Smarts and Pings only come in boring grown up gray because being a grown up apparently means being boring.)

Colored cases would be cool too. At FFL One Touch made it clear they have them. Yeah! Well they didn’t exactly have them at FFL. One Touch said they drop shipped the cases to selected Endo offices. They suggested we could call our Endo and see if they were one of the lucky offices that got them.

Ok I’ll get on that, after the Olympics.

2 comments :

  1. Funny about the meter.

    My meter actually keeps time better than my Animas 2020 pump. We sent the first one back because it lost more than 5 minutes in a month - that's what they guarantee "won't lose more than 5 minutes in a month".

    We are currently about 3 minutes behind on the pump and I need to reset. As far as I can tell, our One Touch Ultra 2 meter is ontime.

    Still going to upgrade to the boring Ping meter - the ability not to have to pull out the pump from my 3 year old is worth it! Hope it keeps time better (both the meter AND the pump)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Oh I think a Ping for squirmy little kid would be a good idea.

    Maybe it is my "Magnetic" personality teht messes up the meter clocks. We have never had one keep time and I gave up sending them back.

    ReplyDelete