Flat front tire this morning. First thing. Before I even started pedaling.\u00a0Not sure how I missed it last night when I rolled my bike from the garage to the house, which is how I do – prep for my morning commute, as much as I can, the night before. Maybe there was nothing to notice, as in\u00a0it was a slow leak. But even then, you think I would have caught a deflated\u00a0tire\u00a0when I rolled my bike over the front door trim and out of the house this morning. It just doesn’t seem possible that it was a full tire until I stood up on the pedals and somehow pushed out all the air – whoosh. When does that ever happen? Like a flat tire in waiting.<\/p>\n
But I don’t know; maybe it was partially full?<\/p>\n
I am belaboring this point here much longer than I belabored it in reality. Which is kind of how writing works. You think something for 10 seconds and then write about it for at least 10 minutes. But also, I just had a flat tire on Friday. Seriously. Three days ago. Back tire. And it \u00a0was a bigger ordeal because I had already biked in more than half of my commute when my tire went flat. So there was some walking and taking the\u00a0max<\/a> and walking again. Really, it could have been much, much worse, if for instance, I lived some where\u00a0without something like a max<\/a>\u00a0that I could put my bike on. But I digress.\u00a0In reality this morning, I was like:\u00a0fuck.\u00a0again. ugh. wish\u00a0I woulda caught it sooner.\u00a0work. email work. why am i embarrassed? make coffee. don’t change your clothes.<\/p>\n When does Bike Gallery open?<\/p>\n In my life, I’ve changed out a flat possibly two times. So, yes, I can change one (although I am slow-ass-slow), but if I don’t absolutely have to, then I don’t. Portland’s got a bajillion bike shops. Bike mechanics have changed a bajillion flats. That makes me, not a bajillion times happier, but happier than I would be if the aforementioned weren’t true.\u00a0I would be a bajillion times happier, if more than one<\/a> of these shops had early morning hours. Like\u00a0last Friday morning, I would have been ecstatic if Metropolis<\/a>, the bike\u00a0shop I walked by on Williams, would have been open. Isn’t there a business case for early morning bike repair hours? Especially post the spring-forward time change, lots of\u00a0people bike commute in pre-bike shop hours, i.e. before 10am. And chains break. Spokes break. Lights stop working.\u00a0Flats happen. Bolts wiggle out of eyelets and racks come loose. But I imagine bike shop people can make a very convincing\u00a0lifestyle case for not starting work before 10.<\/p>\n The guy at the\u00a0Bike Gallery on Sandy<\/a>\u00a0was super fast. Kinda curt. But he didn’t go down the mansplaining hole. This points to\u00a0the low bar I’ve set for the bike shop customer service experience, which is so\u00a0defined by mansplanation overload, that the absence of it counts as a win, regardless of the quality of the work.\u00a0The thing is\u00a0\u00a0I don’t have the expertise to assess the work. If I did, maybe I would just do the work myself. And admittedly, I don’t think to check up on\u00a0the work\u00a0either, or at least whatever I can figure out to check up on. I think I should be able to assume the mechanic has correctly fixed whatever they said the would fix (and charged me to fix) and then put my bike back together so that it won’t fall apart as I am riding it. (In a sec, I will explain why you shouldn’t make this assumption). But also, it’s pretty common for mechanics to talk smack about the work of other mechanics. Like the Bike Gallery dude didn’t find anything that had punctured the tire and tube, so maybe he was talking out of his ass\u00a0when he said that\u00a0what caused the flat\u00a0was that someone had installed a\u00a0tube that was\u00a0too big and there a fold in the tube that caused a hot spot that resulted in a slow leak. I’ve been racking my brain trying to remember the last person who fixed a flat on my front tire and I think it at was my regular shop<\/a> and I just can’t imagine those guys fucking up the\u00a0tube. The Cat Six guys are the best.<\/p>\n