When my employer convinced me to start cycling to work, I expected to save some money and perhaps drop a kilo or two from around my middle; I didn’t expect it to take over my life.
And yet here I am staring at my new bike, the second one I’ve bought in as many years, a bike for which I’ve paid an astonishing £1000. Morning, noon and night, cycling is all I think about. I care more about bicycles now than I do about computers—And I’m a geek. Gigabytes, megapixels, flash memory have no meaning to me at all. I don’t give a crap about anything Slashdot, Cnet or Wired have to say and I don’t early adopt things that start with “i” anymore. “Triple butted steel frames” and avoiding “Chain suck” are more important to me than what some stupid iphone app can do. I talk about bicycle components like my wife talks about cheese on toast; All drooly and moany, stifling the urge to climax mid-sentence. I’ve actually referred to a pair of clipless pedals as “sexy”. How did this happen?
I blame it on the fact that I’ve never really been cool. In grade 10, a guidance counsellor gave me one of those tests that decide what job you should do by asking you a number of inane questions like:
In your spare time, do you like to:
a) Hit nails with a hammer
b) Dissect things
c) Work on your car or
d) Write computer programs
Then, after a lengthy delay spinning the ancient IBM’s cooling fan at Mach 2 and sucking so much power it made the office fluorescents flicker, it would spit out the job I was meant to do for the rest of my life. The fact that I was more interested in the algorithm the computer program was using to extrapolate the results than I was in the results themselves had given the counsellor more than enough info he needed, but he waited patiently for the computer to finish its work, regardless. There it was in dot matrix black and white, “Computer graphics designer”. This was in 1989; they barely had computer graphics back then; it could only have been a nerdier result if it spit a pocket protector out of the floppy disk drive.
This is why, after 35 birthdays and 10+ years doing nerdy web programming, the idea of speaking intelligently about proper cool things with proper cool guys is very appealing. Cool guys with tattoos, chin beards and metal things in their faces; guys who wear shorts to work. When I took my first bike in for its six month service, a bike mechanic said, “Damn, this bike gets RIDDEN!”; It made me feel like a proper man, it did. I felt like replying with a “FUCK YES!” and an aggressive pelvic thrust.
They know exactly what they’re doing. I pander to their coolness just like I did with the jocks in junior high, simply repeating what they say back to them to cover up the fact I had no idea what they were on about. “Oh yeah, Vince, I totally know what you mean… Joe Montana was, like, way overrated, that erm other guy was a much better Wide End”. Being a nerd was tough, we didn’t have Wikipedia back then.
Cool bike shop guys can sense my nerdiness and they work it to their advantage. They pretend I’m part of their cool cycle GANG to sell me things. “Oh yeah, those drivers, eh? What a bunch of pricks! Not like US cyclists, eh? Heh heh. By the way, have you seen the new carbon fibre whatsit mcdoodle? It will totally change your life!” Last time I came out with 10 pouches of this weird purple goo. I have no idea what it’s for; I think I’m meant to eat it.
When I first started cycle commuting, I didn’t get the whole cyclist versus driver thing. I felt like I would be the one to bridge the gap between drivers and cyclists. Tutting other cyclists who didn’t stop for red lights, Stopping for cars at unmarked intersections (No, after you mate, please) and wearing baggy shorts over my spandex to shield the drivers from my gyrating Johnson.
It didn’t last. Getting consistently honked, shouted and driven at by the motoring public has changed my mind. Last week an idiot in a Mondeo actually tried to punch his middle finger through his own windshield at me. He was so furious, words had escaped him; he could only scream maniacally like Dawn French at an empty Chinese buffet table. My crime? Standing still waiting for the light to change.
It’s not just drivers cyclists hate, cyclists hate each other as well. God save you if you’ve bought the wrong bike.
At my work bike racks, someone had done this to one of the bikes:
Is it the white seat? The paint job? The brand? Who knows.
To avoid being mocked by other cyclists, I made sure I visited the internet bike forums before I made my purchase (did I mention I was a geek?). The bike I purchased was rated as “cool” by the cool bike people on every site I visited. However, when I put a photo of my bike on these same sites, it was called “lame”, “nerdy” and “old mannish”. How could this be?!
They explained that simply buying a cool bike is not cool enough. You need to cool it up yourself in order to avoid being called names by other cyclists. I did everything I was told to do (bar one). Look at the two photos below of my bike. Can you spot the 8 differences between the Super cool bike and the Massive idiot bike as pointed out to me by the cool bike people? Two hints: 1) Many of them are unfairly difficult to see and 2) Pairs of things (like the fenders) count as “2”.
If you can figure them all out you (like me) are very sad. If you figure out the final thing I was advised to do, but didn’t, you should seek professional help.
