Don’t Tell My Other Customers
I dropped off my bike at Hiawatha Cyclery on Friday. It’s funny how being away from it for a couple of weeks gave me a fresh perspective.
My Surly is:
- Light
- Unattractive
- Scraped and beat up all to hell
Fortunately, Jim can’t do anything about any of those things. He is going to rewrap my handlebars (with “natual look cork tape”) and give my bike a thorough tuneup, including truing the wheels. I’m hoping that when I get back on next week that riding will be… smoother? I dunno, it just seemed like a good time to drop off my bike.
Jim took one look at my ad-hoc pannier support and made me take my bike home.
“Get that atrocity out of my shop!” he bellowed.
I’m kidding! Jim seemed amused, so I explained that I just clip my old attache/messenger bag to the rack on the side of my bike, and that the wire mesh square keeps the bag out of the spokes. The square is from those shelves that you put together with the plastic pieces at the corners. He said that I shouldn’t tell his customers about it, since they would stop buying expensive panniers and stuff. I don’t know about that, but he might be able to put together a package of hardware to allow a person to clip their trendy messenger bag to their bike — something less ugly and/or more pemanent than my solution. As it stands I hope to pick up a real pannier bag before fall, because this bag isn’t quite big enough. I want two bags now. I’m so greedy.
I totally used those wire cubes for a ‘dresser’ when I was in high school. Only mine were cooler than your bikes, because they were black. Like my soul.