October 05, 2007

Ma'am, did you lose a morning? 'Cause this one isn't mine.

I should rename the category that contains my bicycle posts "if only you could push the pedals and go forward but alas you cannot". Right now exactly half of them are about bike accidents, malfunctions, and other failures to just get on the damn thing and ride places, and I'm about to make it slightly more than half.

This morning I decided, encouraged by an apparent drying trend in the weather, to bike to work. One of the many nice things about this plan is that it lets me leave the house about 20 minutes later than I'd need to if I were taking the train, so I lingered over breakfast, washed my dishes nicely (see, I should have a gold star), spent some time looking for my favorite sweater, and finally went down to the garage to get my bike. I hadn't checked in on it since Wednesday night, but on Wednesday night it had been in gorgeous shape. I'd even pumped up the tires for a smooth and pleasant riding experience.

You see where this is going, even if I never saw it coming. I got down to the garage and found my rear tire, this time, rim-on-the-ground flat. And me about to be 30 minutes late to work through no fault of my own -- with a tire that went dead flat in under a day and a half, I couldn't pump it up to get to work and expect it to even still roll by quitting time.

A few minutes later I was at the Max station, sulkily waiting for what turned out to be the same train my owning roommate takes. I told him what had happened, and he nodded sagely. "It's those road bike tires," he said, with all the sympathy of the habitual mountain-bike rider, "and their high pressure..."

I may at this point have done a creditable impression of my own tire, consisting of first inflating and then exploding. "No!" I explained totally reasonably at high volume. "I've had this bike for twelve years and I've never had a totally flat tire until this month! It is not a road bike thing! It is a the guys at the bike shop talked me into getting new nice expensive tires and there's something fucking wrong with them thing!"

I dearly love my neighborhood bike shop and the nice bike dudes contained therein. They consistently give me friendly, reasonably priced service and good advice. But right now I could just about go and kick every one of them in the balls for getting me to give up my old, cracking, tread-deficient tires. Those tires never did me wrong; these have an agenda to keep me off the street with their flats and their affinity for train tracks. If the shop will take them back I'm going to trade for a pair that's not possessed.

Posted by dianna at October 5, 2007 09:55 AM
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