This sound familiar? You’re minding your own business watching some race on TV, and your S.O. walks in the room during a Road ID commercial and immediately demands that you buy one and wear it at all times. You want to tell him/her that you abhor Bob Roll and you’d rather bleed out on the road shoulder than support a company he endorses, but first you have to explain ‘Bob Roll’ and who wants to do that so you place the order and dutifully wear the band, even though it burns your flesh.

Luckily there’s now an alternative, and it’s not just a knockoff. MyID is a $20 band that comes in an assortment of pretty color combinations (dammit they sent me black and grey), with a QR code printed on the inside. When you get your band you log on to myidband.com and set up your free profile with the ID and PIN numbers on the band. The profile page is where MyID distinguishes itself from RoadID. You can list multiple emergency contacts, medical conditions, insurance information, allergies, or even sneak in pithy lines like ‘Suffers from lycanthropy do not revive during full moon’. Or ‘Do not amputate vestigial tail’. If you’re a hopeless bike racer and insist on humblebragging you can write ‘I have an extraordinarily low resting heartrate because I’m an awesome bike racer do not resuscitate. Really. It’s sooooo low I’m practically dead.” The possibilities are endless.

Aside from the fact that you can load more information, you can also update that information at any time. So if you are cured of your werewolfedness you can opt for mouth to mouth during a full moon. Or, if you’re off at some training camp you can change your emergency contact to someone at the camp instead of bothering your S.O. back home who’s already really annoyed that you’d rather spend your limited vacation days with a bunch of sweaty cyclists in some godforsaken wasteland instead of with him/her in Paris and he/she’s really starting to have doubts about this relationship what’s Biopace and why’s that supposed be a joke I mean where is this going anyway?

The Bad News
I next decided to do some real research instead of just writing a smartass review. I talked to two EMT’s, the beloved Anthony Skorochod (he of Cycling Captured fame), and my brother in law. While my brother in law said he would know what to do when he saw the band, Skorochod was less impressed.

According to Anthony, a paramedic with 25 years experience, his peers are trained to look for Medic Alert bracelets, and will probably ignore a silicone band, thinking it’s a Livestrong knockoff. A bracelet can’t hurt, but the one thing ALL paramedics do is go through your wallet. So if there’s something that has to be known, print it on a card and put it in your wallet. Anthony never rides without his wallet for this very reason.

Finally
Endevr, maker of MyID, also makes ion bracelets. So now you’ll have to choose between associating with Bob Roll or ion bracelets. Why does life have to be so complicated?