I really do like this thing

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you  on behalf of the Garmin Corporation for your purchase of the Garmin Forerunner® 305; the Pinnacle in mobilized GPS-enabled wrist mounted fitness technology. 

Honest to god, it came with this sticker

We sincerely hope that you are satisfied with your purchase. However, we would like to call attention to the large opaque sticker we have decided to conspicuously place on the display of your Garmin Forerunner®© 305, to let you know that we here at the Garmin Corporation hold many patents.  Some of them may even be related to your new toy, but honestly probably not all of them.  We can’t really be sure. We’re pretty sure that we can safely say this product may be covered by one of more of the patents listed.  It wouldn’t be unreasonable to even say that Garmin might even own some of them. Scary, to say the least.

Either way, we would like you to be aware that, some, few or maybe even all of the parts of your newly purchased Garmin Forerunner 305®©TM, especially the really good complicated technology type bits, but maybe also some of the other stuff too, are covered by U.S. patents. Why it is exactly that we have decided that you, the average consumer, need to know about our patents is a mystery only known by the Garmin Legal Department, and they’re all the way up there on the 16th floor. 

The rest of us don’t really go up there much.  Our office even has one of those fancy elevators where you need a special card key to get into any of the really cool parts of the building so you can’t even get up there without the special card, or by going up the stairs. But, fuck that.  I hear they have an awesome indoor waterfall up there, and a really cute secretary.  

Phil, from the 3rd floor says he heard from someone on the cleaning crew that she is having an affair with someone on the board of directors, and Phil doesn’t lie about that kind of stuff, and he took like two years of high school Spanish so he gets all the good gossip from the cleaning crew.

Anyway, we’d just really like you to know that we have a lot of smart people here, working on really smart stuff, and if you were thinking about copying any of it, you probably shouldn’t because most of it definitely might be covered under some kind of patent, maybe even more than one.  In case you hadn’t noticed we listed like 60 on that sticker. I’m not even sure if there are 60 parts in this thing, which is really something to think about. 

We here at Garmin do sincerely hope you enjoy using your new Garmin Forerunner 305®©TM AFLCIO NAACP, just don’t bother trying to copy us, because we’re pretty sure we came up with at least some of it. In fact, you probably shouldn’t try to invent anything that you can put on your wrist, just to be safe.  Our lawyers are scary. Nevermind the fact that there are a finite number of ways to do things in this world, and the real innovations in a device like this one could easily be counted on one hand.

The point is that Garmin has more lawyers than you, and we have the patents to prove it. It’s not like you can just stroll down to some kind of office with a few diagrams, a couple thousand dollars and several pages of circuitous bullshit and get yourself a shiny new patent….

Oh, I almost forgot!  Perhaps you also noticed the little warning we’ve been mandated to include with our product by the stupid hippies in the State of California.  Your brand new Garmin Forerunner®©TM CNN 305 was manufactured using one or more (probably a lot more) chemicals that could give you cancer, cause birth defects, or prevent you from getting a boner. So, just to be safe, you should probably avoid eating it.  We’re hoping it will make us seem just a little more responsible if we display the warning prominently. But honestly, you’ve already bought the thing. We could care less if you get cancer and die.

Sincerely,

The guy at Garmin in charge of printing out stickers.

Senor.Limon@crujonessociety.com