The crappy snow conditions have killed most of the shop's income. The days are "dead" in the sense that hours can pass between customers and mere lookers popping in. Thus, financially, the business itself is on that crumbling edge so sadly familiar to brick and mortar retail in general, and small retail in particular.
With plenty of time on my hands, when the boss said he wanted some piled-up repair records filed away, I decided to revamp the filing system completely.
Back in the 1990s, we started keeping detailed records of all the work we did, because the mountain bike boom was exposing us to lots of warranty claims and attempts to get something for nothing. A customer would come in saying, "You just worked on my bike and then (insert catastrophe here) happened." Because of the huge repair volume in general, and the fact that we had as many as five people doing mechanical work during peak periods, we might remember someone's face, but not the details of our previous service to them. Even if we did remember, a written record is much more convincing in the quasi-courtroom atmosphere that often developed just outside the workshop doorway.
"You just worked on my bike and then my shifting went out!"
"Yes, well, according to our records here, we fixed a flat tire for you, and you specifically told us to do nothing else."
"Oh. Can you fix my gears?"
"Absolutely!"
These documents pile up. We cull them every ten years or so, saving only the most interesting. For instance, back in the mid 1990s, we did some work for Roff Smith before his tour around Australia in 1996. His parents lived in Tamworth, NH, at the time, so we got to see him both before and after that epic journey. And I like to keep the records from any interesting bike I build.
Typically, we would file the records alphabetically, but boxed together in one- or two-year groupings. This can be a pain in the ass when a customer has a question about prior work -- reproducing componentry spec on a bike no longer with us, for instance, or checking on the full history of a subsystem -- because none of us might remember for sure when the work took place. For years I had wanted to file alphabetically only, with each customer's records chronologically arranged within their section.
I've made it to the letter P in just over a week.
After 28 years in the same shop, I see pieces of life stories, and even know how some of them have ended. Several have fallen to the terrifying, implacable scourge of cancer, which Americans face alone, battling not only the disease, but also the profit-driven corporations that control both treatment and access to treatment. And the names include two murdered women, written in their own handwriting, in each case a year or less from the date of those still-unsolved murders. Both were divorced. One was shot execution-style on Halloween, in 2010, in the home she had recently purchased in another town. The other was brutally butchered with a knife on Mothers Day, 2009. As usual with violence against women, the problem is not too few suspects, but too many.
I try to remember their faces, bits of conversation we might have had. No one deserves to die that way. The rage and contempt indicate murderers who felt entitled. There have been no remorseful suicides in the suspect pool. As far as we can tell, the killers are happily getting away with it.
The living go on living. Those of us inclined to fix things try to keep things running. The forces of destruction oppose us. The record will be alphabetized until someone knocks over the boxes.
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