From: geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM (Geoff Miller)
Newsgroups: alt.peeves
Subject: Re: Assorted peeves (collect 'em, trade 'em with your friends)
Followup-To: alt.peeves
Date: 7 Oct 1992 18:33:36 GMT
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Menlo Park, Ca.
NNTP-Posting-Host: purplehaze.corp.sun.com
Keywords: Waking up, officemates, detours, bike locks, poodle phlegm



In article <26644@castle.ed.ac.uk> tjc@castle.ed.ac.uk (A J Cunningham) writes:

>My problem with bike locks is that I don't have enough. I have one bike
>(old and decrepit but my first real bike so I want to keep it) securely
>locked in an outside toilet (Don't ask) and a brand new !Peeve bike
>which lives in my living room. It looks as though I'll have to lash out
>another forty notes for a second bike lock.


All through high school and college, there was always a certain subset of
the bicycle crowd who refused to lock their bikes in the bike racks as
normal Earth people do, but insisted on obsessively carting the things 
around with them all day ("clickclickcliclickclickclick") from room to room.
Like a good many phenomena (note the proper use of the plural form), this 
behavior has never been explained to my satisfaction.  

It's always struck me as a severe pain in the ass to have to push a bike
around constantly; it reminds me of that guy in the magazine cartoons
with the ball and chain on his ankle who's perpetually pushing a giant
boulder up a steep hill.  (Who is that, anyway?  Is he a character from
mythology, or perhaps from the Bible?)  Not only is it a hassle for the
actual person doing the pushing, but it's inconsiderate to others who have
to make allowances for this bulky, anomalous item in the hallways and 
classrooms.  If these bikes are so valuable that their owners are afraid to
lock them up like normal people do, perhaps they shouldn't be ridden to 
school, but only brought out on fair-weather Sundays like cherry 427 Cobras.

Something else I noticed is that the people who do this are the same 
hardcore bicycle fanatics who refuse to equip their bikes with kickstands.
Now why would somebody want a bicycle without a kickstand?  That's terribly
impractical, and you'd always have to (a) find a wall to lean it against,
and therefore (b) be perpetually on edge about people brushing against it 
and knocking it down.  

I submit that the weight of a kickstand is laughably insignificant when 
compared to the weight of the bicycle itself and the person riding it.
But a lot of bicycle fanatics have difficulty keeping that sort of thing
in perspective, and insist on purchasing one component over another in
order to save a couple of grams.  My friend Dave is one of these people.
He told me one day that he didn't put a kickstand on his bike because
it would've meant extra weight.  I let this pass without comment.  A couple
of weeks later, we were discussing the SR-71 for some reason.  I asked
him if he knew the real reason it was so fast.  "No, why?" he asked.
"Because it doesn't have a kickstand!" I replied with a straight face.



Geoff


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Geoff Miller                    + + + + + + + +        Sun Microsystems
geoffm@purplehaze.Corp.Sun.COM  + + + + + + + +     Menlo Park, California
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