What's Pedro On?

So a couple of years ago I was at EMS’s (Eastern Mountain Sports for the uninformed) tent sale and bought a Pedro’s floor pump called the “Domestique”. The fact that I picked it up for mere pennies on the dollar should have told me something, but I develop tunnel vision when I see a supposed deal. Well, anyhow, I got the thing home and pumped my tires, during the course of which I almost popped a blood vessel in my eye. No, seriously, in was the most incredibly taxing Herculean feat of strength I’ve ever had to perform just in order to get the needle to even crawl out of the double digits. I’m not a small guy and, for my size, I’m pretty damn strong. What gives?

Seeing that I like to get my workout DURING a ride and not before it, the pump became another neglected fixture amongst my belongings. Well the other pump that I had been using due to the Domestique’s inefficacy ended up breaking and I was again left to wrestle with this little masochistic piece of junk. One night I am pumping up my tire for the next morning’s commute and in the process of torquing it this way and that it shoots out from under me, sending my body ground ward. After righting myself and checking to ensure no one had noticed, I stomped over to my laptop and typed up a wordy condemnation of the Domestique to the master craftsman himself, Pedro. Well I got an e-mail back (interestingly enough from a guy not name Pedro) that says the Domestique is not really intended for pumping up high pressure road bike tires and is more for mountain bikers, recreational cyclists, and whoever else falls into that low-pressure lot.

At this point my brain recoils inside my skull at the seemingly impossible irony it’s just been introduced to. Let’s recap - this pump, named the Domestique, a term used to refer to a particular role of a cyclist in ROAD bike racing, is not designed to adequately inflate ROAD bike tires. Still reeling from all the mental anguish this has caused me, I try to think up a course of action that doesn’t involve me planting my face into the keyboard. I decide to fly in the face of what apparently goes for ‘reason’ at Pedro’s and make an appeal to the customer service rep that had e-mailed me back. I’m hoping he’s not as baked out of his gourd when he reads my e-mail as Pedro was when he dubbed this devilish little device the “Domestique”. Amazingly, the customer service rep can see where I am coming from and, in fact, said that he’d pass this information along to his marketing department. Actually he does me one better – he upgrades me to the “Super Prestige” pump for free and assures me this pump will not cast me to the ground like some sort of belly flopping dimwit. So even though the finer points of cycling nomenclature and marketing seems to fail Pedro, it’s at least nice to know he’s got great customer service.