Bicycles

Don’t lose your bike key

mutantbikeWhen I help a customer in the bike shop to choose a new lock, my standard spiel includes: “…and it comes with five identical keys. Don’t carry them all around together”.

So guess what I did?

Five days ago with the best of intentions, I finally reclaimed my old mountainbike from Red Sara’s crowded shed. This is a strange little brass-coloured mutant my brother Bennett bought for me at a Toronto auction maybe 15 years ago, which I brought back to Vancouver on the plane. It is a weird unlabeled prototype with fat aluminum tubing, high-quality components and fancy gold axles. Tiny: maybe a 13″ frame, which I did not realize is actually too small for me until, like many of my customers, I finally got a bike that actually fits me, and understood why i would get pain in my neck from riding that too-small bike. But it is a fine funky little beast, and someone should be loving it.

I took the bike from Sara’s to donate to Kickstand,our local community bike hub. It was bucketing rain and when I got to Kickstand I found it closed until later in the day. Not wanting to push the bike any farther in the rain I locked it to a rack outside a falafel shop a block away, with my Krypto lock. I was going to come back later in the day to donate the bike. And of course, somewhere between the falafel shop and home—I lost the keys. Both of them.

This was on Monday. It is now Saturday. My poor little bike remains locked securely to the rack outside the falafel shop, stoic in the rain. It is no easy thing to break a sturdy U-lock off a bike in a rack, in full view, on Commercial Drive—a challenge, even for a pro bike thief. It would break my heart to see it get picked away, wheel by wheel, piece by piece.

 

2 Comments on “Don’t lose your bike key

  1. Not to worry. I expect that someone from Kickstand will be happy to come along with a sharp hacksaw and free it up for donation. Shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes of cutting time. Much less with a high speed electric grinding/cutting tool. You shouldn’t have to worry or do it yourself.

  2. So…just when the good people of Kickstand were about to help me saw my bike off the rack… a neighbour found my bike keys! Hurrah! And then, as I unlocked the bike to wheel it over to Kickstand to donate … I realized I could not give away that bike. Just…shouldn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t. And didn’t. Luckily, because…(see next post). Crazyass.

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