Working sick

 When I tested positive for Covid last Saturday evening, management scheduled me for the next two days off to see if I could recover fully before they absolutely needed me the following Tuesday.

Mind you, I had already felt functional enough to return to work after the previous bonus days off when I was really feeling sick. The positive Covid test automatically made me feel sicker again, but I wasn't really. No fever. Some congestion. Very occasional cough. Not too different from how I feel in the winter anyway. Indeed, years of testing negative because I felt a slight scratchy throat or a somewhat persistent sniffle had given me excessive confidence in my lonely habits of social isolation to avoid infection of any kind.

My life is a one-man show. The cellist has her career, which takes her away for months at a time. I'm left to manage the estate. Nothing gets done unless I personally lay hands upon it and do it. In the winter, that means all snow removal and firewood splitting on top of the usual grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, cat care...

During prior, more conventional illnesses, I knew where I stood by how I felt. Colds were colds, flu was flu. Norovirus was the devil's work. All known quantities. This Covid shit is something else entirely. As complacent as the public has grown with it, it still presents surprises to each individual who gets it, especially for the first time. Which of the more optional symptoms will you get? The puking and diarrhea? The blood clots? The deep respiratory infection? The long drag of joint pain and brain fog?

My recovery slowed, but did not reverse. My sinuses produce a more alarming and disgusting product than the run of the mill snot of a normal winter. The cough last night, after I had to put in two or three hours with the snow thrower after I got home from work turned deep, vibrating my rib cage. My brother, who has been through it himself and cared for others around him warned me about pushing too hard. But if I don't push enough when the situation demands it, I won't be able to get out of the house.

At work, I wear a mask. No one says anything, but I catch varying reactions ranging from mild alarm to humorous contempt. Anyone who thinks I'm being silly is welcome to a snot rocket in their coffee cup. But even a sympathetic reaction marks me as weakened. Just as an animal, I hate to appear weakened. And, having this still-new-to-science disease, I am weakened, and no one can tell me how much. Maybe what I feel is pretty accurate. Maybe I'll drop through into something really debilitating. Roll the dice!

The sickness coincides with a period in which I will be working six days a week indefinitely, because our year-round part timer quit, and our seasonal part timer only wants to work three days. It's impossible to find anyone to work here, not because of inherent character flaws in the working population, but because the job is chronically low-paying and weird. At each point that we've had to hire someone, from the mid-1990s into the early 2000s, we had some degree of "cool factor" to attract someone young and intelligent. We have no "cool factor" now. I have no idea what would make anyone want to work here. Apparently, no one else does, either.

The shop itself is an evolved product of its specific environment, as independent shops so often are. "The Industry" tries to analyze shops like ours from outside, so that they can set expectations and pressure us to move product. They don't want to listen and cater to individuality. They want to predict production quotas and dump merchandise. Meanwhile, in through the other door walk the customers, with whatever they think bikes are, or looking for whatever they think bikes should be.

It's winter now, so most of the business is ski related. That's another whole realm in which we chose our specialty -- cross-country -- and try to please as many customers as possible. Just like the bike industry, the categories of cross-country skiing have gotten more separated, more complicated, and more expensive. A shop has to guess how many of what kind of skier of what height, weight, and experience level will come in, and how much money will they be willing to spend. We've gone from having a little bit of everything to having not quite enough of hardly anything. Except for having way too much of some things no one seems to want.

Day will follow day in an endless grind in which the day of the week itself will become almost meaningless. It only matters to me because of how it affects customer behavior. Weekends tend to be busier and more festive. Other than that it's just a bleak plod toward the grave. I can still make myself useful to a few people. You're only worth what you contribute to society.

As the only person who cleans up in the workshop or maintains any of the equipment, being here nearly every day helps me stay on top of that, and the trash. I've already cleaned up a lot of the neglect that accumulated while I was away for almost a month caring for the cellist. Part timers don't have to care about the long term effects of their lax habits. They know that we're grateful at this point just to have a relatively sentient being who can cover things in a rudimentary fashion while the full-time people try to catch up briefly on sleep and laundry. Frankly, I'm just as glad not to have to clean up after some of the well-meaning slobs who have deigned to "help" us over the years. But it's going to grind me down.

Life is just a journey to death anyway. No one knows how long it will be and how comfortable or uncomfortable. Dreams are just dead weight. All anyone really needs is a job to go to and a place to rest up between shifts. The sooner you cauterize away any notions of fun, frolic and creativity, the better you will be prepared for reality.

Welp, it's Covid

 I felt good enough to go back to work yesterday. I masked just out of courtesy, even if I had just a cold or flu. It acted like a cold or flu, albeit a bad cold or a middling flu. Today I dropped the mask, feeling not quite a hundred percent, but only minorly inconvenienced. Like, I wake up feeling this shitty on most winter mornings.

With the cross-country skiing destroyed by a heavy rain that turned into an ice storm and then froze hard, we haven't been renting skis, so the bike repairs that popped up were welcome.

The first call was a road rider who had noticed as she rode her trainer that the chainrings seemed really wobbly. She brought the bike in. The BB bearings on the drive side were pulverized.

As part of the initial inspection, I sprayed the bottom bracket area with Finish Line Speed Degreaser. I smelled nothing. Ooohhhh, that's not good. I'd noticed a typical diminished sense of smell with this sickness, as one gets with any sinus congestion. But this was absolute erasure of a smell that usually permeates the shop when you use the product.

I bought new Covid tests on the way home from work, since the ones I had on hand were at least three years old. I've led a bit of a charmed life so far, avoiding people like the plague since 2020. I don't mask much. I just choose my times and places to avoid crowd density, and I'd been really lucky with our own clientele. I've hardly had a sniffle of any kind since the end of 2019. Until now.

Not any more. The colors popped up vibrantly. No squinting at faint lines, wondering if I could pretend not to see it. I wouldn't even have thought to check if I hadn't noticed anosmia.

I continue to feel better and better. Now's the time use my super power while I scoop the cat boxes and take out the disgusting kitchen trash. 

If you can't think of others, at least think of yourself

 (Partial cross post from Explore Cross-Country)

Ski season began with a little storm in mid December that got the trails operating. Warmer weather and wet precipitation ended that, icing up the trails. Like magic, someone brought in a fat bike for service. With thin cover now, I never know which apron I will need.

The bike apron weighs 2 1/2 pounds. The ski service apron weighs eight ounces. Ski service has dominated, despite the meager amount of trail we have to offer, but it's all subject to the whims of the public. We're ready either way. But dealing with the public's other whims has made the job much more stressful.

 In one significant way, the winter of 2020-2021 was much better than the one we're in now. We had stringent pandemic precautions in place, and people abided by them or they didn't get to come in. We had enough people on staff to deal with the huge volume of rental business. The snow cover wasn't great, which is a new trend in the changing climate, but it was good enough for us to operate. The main issue was crowd control, and we had that well organized.

Last winter, there was no vaccine yet. The consequences of infection could be severe enough that we could make a case and make it stick. No doubt we lost some business, and invited some ridicule, but we're all still here. 

Over the summer, we relaxed our protocols as everyone else did. For a few months we even went maskless, until the Delta surge. When I had a close call with exposure through my position on the zoning board I serve on, we all started covering up again. We didn't go to the full system of baffles we'd used during the uncontrolled phase of the illness. We did not re-institute our mask mandate for incoming customers. But I really appreciated any customers who wore one anyway, and I appreciate them vastly more now.

The omicron variant has created a new realm of anxiety, aggravated by the fact that we now have fewer employees to run the business. Ideally, the staff should be no less than three. Most days we only have two. Because of that, I can't do service work as efficiently during business hours, because I have to drop it to deal with direct customer service needs on the retail floor and in rental, as well as covering the front while the other guy tries to shove down some food.

The other guy -- who actually owns the place -- is also the groomer. Get him sick, and we not only have to close the shop, you also don't get any groomed trails until he's off the disabled list. So, even if you aren't afraid of the illness, think it's trivial, and believe that we should all just snuffle each other's snot and get it over with, remember that your good time at our ski area depends on us being there to serve you. If you get us sick, we may not be dead or dying, but we're not at work.

 Mask up, keep your distance, and don't be a jerk. It's called enlightened self interest.

COVID's killing Specialized

 Specialized Bicycles is dumping small dealers like a centipede shedding injured legs, in a desperate attempt to save itself from the mess that the bike industry started making for itself back in the 1990s, when technofascism combined with outsourcing to create the repeated waves of obsolescence poured on consumers from factories in distant lands.

When the pandemic hit, it wiped out production first, because the factories were all in areas close to the source of the disease. Because of the nature of the disease, and the inertia of human greed, the illness managed to spread rapidly around the world, taking down all of the systems of the global economy. Then the guidelines of social distancing led to an unprecedented surge in outdoor activities, including biking. Shrunken supply met voracious demand.

I don't know how many -- if any -- of the other major companies, like Trek or Giant, are also shriveling under the strain. Specialized was our last major line. Major or minor, we have had no bikes to sell since the spring of 2020 anyway. Almost none, anyway. We received the odd token here or there as supplies dwindled.

Specialized thinks that it is acting in its own best interest, but how are the hundreds of customers who have bought Specialized bikes from us over the years supposed to get the proprietary parts that the industry has made the norm since the epidemic of "innovation" that hit us in the 1990s? Maybe consumers will be able to order directly from Specialized and then go to a derelict dealer like us to have the work done. Maybe the era of the independent bike shop is truly over, and customers with a bit of mechanical inclination will become their own mechanics, under the tutelage of online video experts.

Many more people are trying to do their own work now, bringing them face to face with the obsessive changes forced on them by an industry interested solely in pumping complete bikes out of massive factories, year after year. Maybe consumers will achieve what beleaguered shops had no hope of doing. Maybe they will rebel and vote with their wallets for technological stability and real product support.

It's a long shot. I tried to wise people up when the whole mess was getting started in the 1990s. Instead, they lined up in hordes to lap up the sweet bait that the industry poured out for them. Because riders in a boom don't generally last longer than the brief lifespan of an abused bike, most of them were gone too soon to have to deal with the ephemeral nature of the innovated bicycle.

Most of the innovation has gone into how to make mid-level and entry level bikes reprehensibly flimsy. A year or two ago I was saying that a good $500 bike was a thousand dollars now. Recently I had to revise it to at least two grand, and even then the $500 bike of the 1990s has much more solid basic componentry. It may not have all the moving parts and modern look, but it has a better shot at longevity.

Longevity is out of fashion. Indeed, as we screw up everything from the environment that supports all life to the democracy that supports diverse cooperation, longevity may be an unrealistic goal. Live hard! Die young! Have nothing but fun and go out in a fireball.

In the end, Specialized probably won't die from the pandemic. It will probably shrink to a manageable size, as other companies that have been in its shadow grow to similar size, and serve whatever there is of a riding public in smaller, more regional ways. One can only hope that this leads to some standardization of componentry and simplification of design so that riders are confident venturing beyond the reach of their specific brand's kingdom.

 In the 1970s and early '80s, bikes were simple enough and used enough similar standards to allow small shops to serve riders at all levels at least well enough to keep them riding. The first edition of Sutherland's Handbook was about a quarter the thickness of the tome by the turn of the century. Simplicity allowed for a broader base of support, spread among more manufacturers and independent retailers.

Delta dawn

 Checking my email this morning, I saw a "heads up" from the chair of the zoning board on which I serve. These usually involve pending applications, but this time it was to let us all know that she'd gotten a positive test for Covid-19 when she was getting ready to travel to Canada. She was vaccinated in April, and is asymptomatic. We don't sit close together at meetings. No one sneezed, coughed, guffawed, or shouted. But the case we concluded most recently was the toughest one we'd ever faced, and required multiple continuations lasting more than two hours each time.

I made immediate arrangements to get a swab rammed up my nose this afternoon. Because I've technically been exposed, I have to take the long form test, which takes 2-5 days to give results. What does this mean for our shorthanded shop? I haven't heard back from upper management. However, because I have invested in shop-level tools for years, I can do a lot of work from home. That being said, there's a few things I don't have. Bleed kits, for instance. And I don't have the spare parts, lubes, and cleaners in shop quantities. If I were to be pinned down here for an extended period, the business would have to recreate the main shop as much as possible here at the leper colony. Let's hope it doesn't come to that.

In case anyone reading this has been lulled into some degree of the false sense of security permeating the nation right now, let me suggest that we should all return to a higher defcon immediately. At the shop we are all vaccinated, and had relaxed mask requirements in keeping with the public mood and the state's relaxation of vigilance. However, noting the surge in cases not only in the hottest spots of sociopathic unconcern in the name of "freedom," but in our own relatively protected state, we'd been discussing whether to tighten things up.

Whatever the results of today's test, I'm covering up again and avoiding any place where people don't. Given the national laxity, that means avoiding any place with people in it. Can't avoid the grocery store, but I'll be back to shopping like I'm trying to retrieve essential items from a building filled with toxic gas.

Maneuvering against a disease that exhibits such a wide range of results among its recipients is a lot harder than dealing with a tangible foe, or even a disease that has a smaller range of clear-cut symptoms. If Covid made everyone who got it start bleeding through their eyeballs within hours, and coughing up actual chunks of lung within a couple of days, we would have had less trouble convincing people to take it seriously. Sure, there would have been holdouts, but they would have helped to weed themselves out much more quickly.

The tired point bears repeating, that disease prevention goes further than individuals protecting their individual selves from infection and whatever damage it brings them. My friend is fine. She had no inkling that she had been spooged. She just got the test as a routine part of getting clearance to travel. Her result also bears out the wisdom of testing everyone before allowing them to put others at risk. We've settled on certain categories that qualify as riskier, for which we're grudgingly "allowed" to test, by the freedom fighters who safeguard our liberty to be sociopathic assholes.

Endless weekend

 We've reached the part of summer where every day feels like Saturday. Saturday doesn't mean the same thing in a bike shop as it does in the normal world, especially in a resort town. Saturday is peak intensity, the opposite of a day of leisure.

A particular day might seem like a slow Saturday or a busy one, but any summer day can bring in a sudden crowd of people with the day off, looking for something fun to do. It's a very different pattern from winter's ski business, in which the peaks are solidly on the weekends, or on designated short vacation periods.

Particularly now, in the Summer of Denial, a population restless after a lost year is ready to push the limits of safety and gather with their naked faces, as case numbers spike in some regions and crawl gradually higher in others. Our particular part of New Hampshire has notched up to Moderate, while an adjacent county has reached Substantial transmission. We're seeing more masks, and wearing our own again much more of the time, but it's not general. 

Last week, a local man came in for some repair work. In conversation it emerged that he had never masked and he refuses the vaccine. He told us that all you need is hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin, and that masks clearly don't work because the guidance on them has not been consistent from day one. He is always affable, even when he can see that we disagree completely with his position. He's the same guy who wouldn't buy a Fuji Wendigo fat bike because it was named for a demon and he believes in God. And yet his regard for the gentle savior does not extend to such small gestures as wearing a face mask. He's a member of the Superspreader Church of Christ, down the street, where they gathered throughout the early rise of the pandemic until they spawned their very own cluster.

The shop remains shorthanded. It's always hard to find competent help, because we need someone smart enough to do the work and dumb enough to do it for a living. Failing that, we at least need someone who can show up on a regular basis and perform many of the basic mechanical tasks that confront us. We have no new bikes to sell, but repair demand is still high. Parts can be hard to get, but enough come through to keep us going. We're getting killed on freight, because we have to pounce on things as soon as they are available, rather than waiting to fill out larger orders at longer intervals.

I'm gearin' down, down, down down...

 One morning this past week, a dump truck and I crested the same hill from opposite directions and shifted up simultaneously, from the crawling grind of climbing to the gravitational release of the descent. I've shared the road rhythms of dump trucks a lot over the years. Even a racing cyclist has more in common with them than with sports cars. A commuter or a tourist on a loaded bike is definitely close kin, at least when the truck is loaded as well.

On the long grade climbing the north slope of Route 28, the slow grind of dump trucks has allowed me to tuck in behind them and draft at 50 mph for the rest of the way to town, once we passed the height of land. It's deadly dangerous if anything goes wrong. If there's a dropped piece of firewood or other debris in the roadway, the truck will clear it, but if the cyclist t-bones it you'll do the human crayon in a big red smear. It's a stupid habit, but that's true of many addictions and labor-saving actions. As long as you get away with it, it's useful as well as fun. As soon as you don't, you have no one to blame but yourself for whatever condition you end up in after impact. Fortunately, age has slowed me to the point where I can seldom make the jump even into the wake of a big, slow truck on the highway. I still use the draft of large vehicles and the safety zone they create in town traffic whenever possible.

Because heavy trucks and bicycle riders share similar challenges of power to weight ratio, we settle into similar shifting patterns responding to terrain. The big motor vehicles perform over a much wider span of speed in most situations, but on mountainous roads I have passed them on descents where I was better able to handle the curves. Just don't be in the way when the road straightens out, because big brother truck is going to take full advantage of gravity then. They'll mow you down in your car, let alone on a bicycle. You're probably better off on a bicycle, because it's easier to squeeze out of the way and let the monsters run.

It was strangely companionable to share that simultaneous shift. I'm sure that the truck driver didn't notice me at all. There was no need to.

 COVID REINFECTION?

And then there's this: I don't know if it should have been the lead item or a subhed, but trainee Dave was a bit under the weather last week. We haven't seen him at all except when he came in to work on his race bike because he wanted to drop in at the local training race series that night. Other than that he's been too busy or too sick or too well-paid humping brush for a tree service to bother with our paltry needs. He had called in sick every day we needed him, so we asked him what he'd had. He said that, based on his symptoms, he figured he'd had a breakthrough case of Covid, rendered merely uncomfortable because he is fully vaccinated. His unvaccinated girlfriend, whose anti-vax family had all been slammed with it months ago, got slammed again by whatever Dave had. If it was Covid, her immunity from having had it didn't hold up worth a crap. But because we really don't do medical research as thoroughly as we could in this country, there is no comprehensive testing program to determine who had what when. We lose a crap ton of data every day on every medical subject just because we don't scrub personal identifiers off of patient reports and then mine them for very useful case study information.

AND A SAD FAREWELL:

I happened on an item reporting that the legendary Harris Cyclery, long the headquarters for retro ingenuity, and all things Sheldon Brown, was closing. I was heretical enough to disagree with Sheldon on a few things, but no one could deny that his work represented an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the minutiae and healthy functioning of 20th Century bicycles. He did last into the 21st, but was gone before the flood tide of expensive disposability rendered a great deal of his research obsolete. I have not seen how or if his website will be maintained or his Library of Alexandria might be saved from destruction. Even after his death, Harris maintained one of the best cog-farming operations in the business for creative cassettes, and preserved the ethic of long-term ownership and investment-quality goods. No wonder they couldn't keep it up.

Betrayed and abandoned

 In yet another harsh lesson in corporate business methods -- and ethics -- a small but determined Specialized dealer since at least the 1980s finally heard directly from the Big S that our preseason order will not be delivered. They'll "see what they can do" to deliver three paid-in-full special orders for ebikes. No promises. This is after they jacked the price on those prepaid orders by about a thousand bucks a bike, after the fully paid order had been in their hands for months already.

Our shop is not alone. Contacts at a Trek dealer across the lake report that their somewhat larger shop than ours is getting the same treatment from their Big Bike supplier. The big companies are sending all of their available product to the biggest shops in the most heavily populated areas.

The Specialized rep suggested that we look into several smaller brands that have traditionally worked more cooperatively with small shops. Not surprisingly, these brands are already overwhelmed. We will probably have to figure out how to operate as a bikeless bike shop this summer.

The Covid-19 bike boom continues, but the potential customers have now become picky. They really really want a bike, but it's more likely to be a specific bike, rather than anything they can get their hands on. We're hearing from people who have driven 50 or 100 miles to find a shop that has bikes at all. It's reminiscent of the 1990s mountain bike boom, pre-Internet, when people would shop over a huge geographical area to find what they wanted and to save a token amount of money. They'd already spent more just driving around, but they still congratulated themselves on getting a deal. Now the successful treasure hunters are driving until they find a shop big enough to be favored by the big suppliers or lucky enough to have gotten a shipment from one of the smaller ones.

Our service department is already buried. Apparently, no one wants to become a professional bike mechanic anymore. Can you blame them? All you need to keep your own bike running are YouTube videos and tools and parts that you can buy online. It's just a bicycle. It's not like it has a motor -- oh, wait. But even in the smokeless moped culture, intrepid tinkerers are figuring out how to service their own habit.

I feel safe in saying that most riders do not want to be their own mechanic. They will come to us when things go out of whack or ignore problems until the bike completely fails. But no one is showing up to learn the craft. There's a lot to learn, and more is added every year.

Parts are still hard to get. Things really haven't improved much from last year. We're getting pounded on freight charges because we have to buy stuff as soon as it's available, rather than waiting to build up a larger order. If you see it, buy it. Prices are going up. They have to. Every overhead cost except our paychecks is climbing.

Live Free and Kill

Libertarians who equate mask wearing with tyranny not only demonstrate no knowledge of public health, but a gross unconcern with the damage they cause to people who have to deal with them. One selectman in a nearby town was not only part of a 21-case cluster that includes his own family, he also cost us the services of one of our employees, who had to quarantine for two weeks after coming in contact with him. Our small business was impacted even though our employee was fortunate enough not to get sick.

If our employee chose to follow the irresponsible example set by the "liberty" crowd he would have come to work anyway because he felt fine, and probably was. Fortunately, this teenage lad is more mature and responsible than a fully adult government official who holds two elected positions. He chose "better safe than sorry" instead of "better sorry than safe."

Last week, the Town of Ossipee instituted a mask mandate in the town offices, but then rescinded it this week under pressure from this selectman and other exemplars of "personal responsibility" who referred to the people calling for the mandate as "the mask-shaming police."

You can't shame people who have none.

The fact that there are people actively working on the side of the disease against their fellow citizens should come as no surprise considering how recently we had an armed insurrection trying to overturn a national election by storming the US Capitol. It's all part of the same package of self-indulgent foolishness among people who consider themselves to be patriots and heroes because they like to wear guns  and present a threat to people around them. But it raises the stakes whenever you go out for a simple thing like groceries, because you know that COVID's little helpers are spooging up the landscape, even if you don't happen to see one of them while you're out.

Along with being obsessed with "personal freedom," many of these freedom fighters also have a short fuse. Because they are careless with their own health, they're automatically careless with yours. They've taken the rest of us hostage, because no one dares to say anything to them when they go into public places with their freedom faces hanging out. Live Free or Die doesn't say that you have to make any effort whatsoever for anyone else's, only that you can be an uncompromising dick about your own.

COVID surge meets consumer demand

 As goes the nation, so goes New Hampshire. Cases of Covid-19 are surging. The church we can see from our back windows finally managed to turn itself into a super spreader. Mask use has become almost universal. That's the only good effect: a majority of people are now willing to do the simple things which, if adopted much sooner, would have kept disease spread low enough to make us wonder what the fuss was about. But Americans love to run full-face into crises just to prove to themselves that the danger is real. Then we can brag about our valor, display our scars, and weep ostentatiously for the dead.

Meanwhile, demand for winter recreation equipment is matching the public enthusiasm for bicycling that swept the country during the traditionally warmer months. Here it is, December 1, and the temperature outside is almost 60 degrees (F) at dawn. But this is usually a wintry time of year. People are buying cross-country skis and snowshoes in anticipation of something like normal winter weather at some point between now and May. They're getting their existing equipment serviced. At the same time, riders continue to ride, or want one last tune up before storage, or want their trainer bike spiffed up for its months under a rain of sweat.

Because I haven't had a hair cut since... I don't even remember, I have taken to wearing a bike hat at work. The short brim is less likely to get stuck in something when I'm working close, and I refuse to wear a baseball-style cap backwards. The flip brim also handily holds alternate eyewear when I have to work at the computer.

The bike industry was blindsided by the sudden demand for their goods in the spring. Production had been hampered by the disease breaking out in Asia, where most of the products are made. Then transportation was disrupted by many aspects of the disease and the efforts to contain it. This was on top of smaller production in an industry that has been technologically hyperactive, but economically stagnant, for at least a decade, maybe two. But the winter sports industries can't claim to have been surprised. Our own reps were telling us to beef up our orders months ago as we all observed what was happening in the spring and summer market and extrapolated to fall and winter. In spite of that, now we're not even getting everything we ordered in our routine preseason planning, let alone the extras. We've sold through on some categories and no more is in the pipeline.

The cross-country ski industry has been in decline for even longer than the bike industry. A really nice ski set is still way cheaper than a corresponding bicycle, and is much easier to store, but there's no way to avoid the need for some skills and agility to use them. Also, skis come in categories just like bikes. Each category has its own skill set. A skier might do any number, limited only by budget and time. It makes sense to have two or three options because snow conditions can vary enough to favor one or another within a day or two. But in most places skis don't fit into a multi-mode transportation model very well. I tried to figure out a way to ski to work, but it was always going to take about three hours each way and involve a lot of sidehill slogging on salt-splattered embankments next to a highway.

Because the shop is slammed and our technical staff consists of mostly me, the days are a blur of varied tasks seen through fogged glasses over a mask. If anyone says "it's good to be busy" I always point out that there are limits, and that surge workloads are like getting your whole year's worth of meat intake by having a couple of large pot roasts shoved down your throat. Dry.

More service activity

By the end of the week, it's all a blur.

A road bike customer asked whether we could get him short cranks because he's got some sort of calcified tendon problem, and can't bend his knee far enough to get around a pedal stroke on 170mm crank arms.

A quick dip into internet research brought me immediately to Bikesmith Design, a machinist who specializes in exactly what our customer needs. In fact, our customer's brother or brother-in-law or friend or something went to an event in Minneapolis years ago for HPVs and met the machinist, who was already working on shorter cranks because HPVs need them to fit into the confined spaces within fairings on recumbent human-powered speed vehicles.

I got the machinist and the customer talking directly to each other so I could get on with other items in the deluge. Eventually, a couple of sets of little cranks arrived, with detailed instructions for our customer to follow as he explored the limits of his bad leg. One set was 85mm long. Mark, the machinist, suggested that the customer use the 85s on a trainer, because they weren't strong enough for real rides on hilly roads. There was a detailed process to determine what the final crank length should be, as well as a set of 100mm cranks that were fully cleared for road riding. The customer opted instead to have us mount the 100s right away, so he could go try them on the road.

Short cranks don't just lower the top of the stroke, they bring the bottom right up close, too. I raised the seat as much as I could, but the post wasn't long enough to cover 70mm. I sent the customer away with a longer post so he could make the swap after feeling out the new riding position. His fork is cut really short, so the best I could do to bring the bars up was flip the stem. If he reconfigures the bike permanently he will need to replace the fork to get a longer steerer. I don't recommend steep rise stems, and I definitely wouldn't put a big clunky stem raiser on the carbon steerer of the existing fork.

The owner of the Specialized Turbo Como 3.0 ebike we recently assembled came by a few days later and said that she'd had a problem with it not running right. "I just turned it off and back on again," she said. "Then it was fine." Hilarious. The bikes are so computerized that now you can use the classic advice: "Hello, IT department, have you tried turning it off and back on again?"

We assembled another $10,000 mountain bike. This one was shipped here by its owner so he could ride with his buddy, for whom we had built up the new one a couple of weeks ago. Here was a bike that he had owned and ridden for a while, and it shifted like crap. These wide-range drive trains with the 42- or 50-tooth large cogs make all kinds of noises and move really stiffly anyway, but this one looked like it had never been adjusted properly. Nothing was bent, but it threw the chain right over into the spokes without hesitation.

When the owner picked that bike up, he spent the entire time with his phone up to his ear as he monitored an important call.

The heavy hitters are here. One guy called asking for "several road bikes." I was stunned into silence. The pandemic bike frenzy has been big enough to get a few minutes of national news acknowledgement, as well as lots of coverage in the cycling media. But the caller might have been spending a few weeks or months on a private tropical island, having a cleanse and a digital fast. I gathered my wits. They may be few, but they scatter far when I drop them.

"You said 'several road bikes.' Is that to rent or to buy?" I asked.

"Oh, yeah, sorry. To buy. All of my kids are big enough now that I wanted to get them nice road bikes that they won't grow out of."

I explained about the current shortage. Because I believe in providing as complete a picture as possible, I always start by explaining that the bike industry has been in decline for close to 20 years. Next I point out that the coronavirus broke out first where everything gets manufactured these days, torpedoing production before interfering with shipping and distribution as it swept around the globe. Thus, already small planned inventories were reduced even further because factories couldn't meet production targets, just as the public suddenly decided to rediscover bike riding after a long period of neglect. And they all got here a couple of months before you did, my unfortunate friend.

That may seem like a lot of unnecessary detail, but anything less makes the bike industry look sloppy and negligent, and retailers look like slackers. The bike industry is tech-obsessed and self-sabotaging, but they're not sloppy or negligent about it. It isn't even entirely their fault that the public lost interest at the end of the 20th Century. The mountain bike boom had already lasted almost twice as long as the 1970s ten speed boom did. The true believers in the surviving form of mountain biking were always a minority, but they were firmly enough addicted to form the nucleus of the addict pool that the industry farms today. The general population changed hobbies the way they always do.

Now they're back. We'll see where it goes. I doubt if it will last a year, let alone ten or fifteen. Meanwhile, our particular shop operates in an area where most of the categories have attracted a handful of adherents who come in on a regular basis to keep our brain cells challenged.

The owner of a Yamaha smokeless moped that he bought last year from somewhere else had had it shipped to us to assemble. This year, he brought it in because "it's making a grinding noise when I pedal hard." This is the same guy who didn't notice that he had Biopace chainrings for the first ten years that he owned his mountain bike, and then brought it in one day concerned because the chainrings had somehow turned oval. It was conceivable that he had only just now noticed that a mid-motor ebike makes noises when the motor engages. However, grinding might be a sign of something actually amiss. He mentioned that he'd read things on line from owners of the same brand who complained of grinding noises.

The Yamaha is light enough that I can actually lift it into the work stand without my little block and tackle rig, as long as it's early in my work week, and I got almost a good night's sleep the night before.

There was play in the bottom bracket. Or was it the bottom bracket? The crank axle disappears into the motor housing, engaging who knows what in there. I could see the face of a sealed bearing on each side. The play wasn't in those bearings. The motor itself was shifting. Under hard pedaling, this could cause gears to engage improperly. The owner said that he had tightened the mounting bolts and the noise had become worse.

I put a wrench on the bolts. They did not want to turn. They seemed bottomed right out. So I undid them, greased the dry threads, and reinstalled them. They torqued down properly instead of binding up. The motor no longer wiggled. There was a faint trace of play in the bottom bracket bearings themselves, but I couldn't do much about that. It was almost imaginary.

The bike made no alarming noises on a test ride. I called the customer to report that we had finished with it, and suggested that he should start a warranty claim with the original dealer if it made any further noises. I had also changed the chain, which was worn almost to the end of the gauge, and absolutely black with grimy lube.

The rate of repair check-ins seems to have slowed. In any normal season we would get these pauses, sometimes long enough to be alarming, but this is not a normal season. There's a blend of exuberant wealth, sober caution, and reckless, pent-up sociability. The people with money seem very happy. The reckless are ready to run out and embrace life, which sounds great until you consider how they are also exporting death and expecting everyone to be okay with that. Color me cautious, but I'm not going to bother to confront anyone outside of my job, because I don't need to get coughed on by some psychopath.

Pushing through headwinds of contempt and hostility

As a commuting cyclist who rides close to 30 miles on the basic route to work and back, I have spent years in the public eye. Even though the vast majority of drivers make at least some effort to accommodate bike riders, there will generally be at least one a day, on average, somewhere along the route, who will emanate some kind of negativity. It might be as mild as squeezing past at an intersection or as blatant as an actual assault. The worst infractions are quite rare, but you never know when one will come, so you ride in a constant state of tension. Anyone passing could have a bad attitude and the means to inflict it on you.

Pandemic precautions have created another way in which we can judge each other. Any venture out in public now puts you on display, subject to public comment and reaction for your clothing, equipment, and behavior.

At work, we continue to follow protective measures, and continue to take some degree of crap for it every single day. I am fortunate that the management takes the situation seriously, so we're all in the fight together. Any time I have to go to any other business I have to wonder what sort of yahoos will be there, as patrons or staff. The grocery store I use most often is doing the best it can, but the high number of selfish idiots is overwhelming. Basically, I don't go anywhere. I hardly did before, but I miss having the option.

On Sunday I drove because of the forecast for severe thunderstorms by the time I would be trying to ride home. This meant that I came in the back way, on Mill Street, past a church a couple of hundred yards from our parking lot. It's a repurposed building, not a classic New England white church with a steeple. The parking lot was full. A dense crowd of people sprawled over the grounds around a large tent in which a stage had been set up with sound equipment for a band. Almost no one wore masks or stayed very far apart. I wouldn't have gotten as good a look if I had ridden, because I would have come in on Main Street and turned down Mill Street from the top.

I got to the shop, parked, put my mask on, and went inside. Because two of our staff had unavoidable matters to attend to, only El Queso Grande and I were available to work.

Repairs continue to come in at least as fast as they go out. Parts may not be available for various reasons. Customers know now that they can't expect a quick turnaround, but that doesn't mean that we can float through in slow motion. And we still get people who -- for various reasons -- want our attention more urgently.

About an hour into the day, a local dentist showed up with his kid, with some sort of mechanical problem with Junior's mountain bike. They picked up masks from our display in the  entryway, but Baldy took no more than a half a dozen steps into the shop and pulled his mask down, first exposing his nose, and then his whole germ-hole. El Queso Grande asked him to pull it back up. Baldy said, "I wear an N95 all day at work. I know about this stuff."

Yes. And? What does that have to do with wearing this mask, now, incorrectly, when you are in a high risk profession that increases the chance that you may have been exposed? Is the N95 just marketing theater so your patients won't know that you cough all over the place between appointments? Why don't you just wipe off the dental tools in your armpit? Disclaimer: I do not know or guess that he does such a thing. But if he's so blase about precautions in other people's businesses, how serious is he about people's safety in his own?

Think of yourself as a gun. Your breath is your ammunition. If you are not sick, you're loaded with blanks. If you are sick -- even without symptoms -- you're loaded with live rounds. You can injure or mortally wound anyone you hit. Unless you live under very strict isolation, you don't know whether you're dangerous. In any firearm safety class, you learn to treat every gun as if it's loaded. That's one of the touchstones of gun reverence: every "good" gun owner observes that fundamental safety principle. It's a myth, of course. Gun handlers relax that perpetual vigilance and get away with it, until they don't. No one can be perfectly careful all the time. We're only human.

Once asked, the dentist kept his mask in place for the rest of the service visit, including outdoors. But we shouldn't have to keep slapping people straight on this. It's like something out of a movie. We're inside our building, looking out at the pod people milling around waiting to assimilate us.

The repairs continue to inspire improvisation. A local camp brought in a mountain bike from their program, with a freehub body that wouldn't freewheel. With extreme force I could get it to shift slightly back and forth. I could hear the collapsed pawls crunching over ratchet teeth, and something else that I couldn't identify.

The hub was tastefully anodized red to match the bike. It had no brand markings at all. The bike was a KHS. The hub could be made by any number of companies that provide house-brand OEM parts. I had to figure out if the freehub body was removable, and if so, how. Some have a bolt that goes in from the drive side. Some have a bolt that goes in through the non-drive side. Some have the freehub body riveted on, in which case the whole hub would be junk. We had no new replacement wheels in stock, and our one salvaged wheel was dirty, but actually a little too sophisticated to waste on this bike. 

After I removed the axle, I found the wrench flats on the bolt, accessed through the non-drive side. I put the long end of a 12mm hex key into the buried bolt, with a 12mm box wrench around the hex key to provide sufficient leverage (with a cheater pipe) to break the bolt loose. Once I had the body out I could compare it to various pictures on supplier websites to see if I could order a whole new body.

No I could not. So then I had to disassemble the body to see if I could fix the pawls.

The interior was a fairly standard configuration, with three pawls held in place with a circular spring. The spring had broken, allowing the pawls to shift out of position. This, combined with the broken fragments of the spring itself, had jammed the mechanism. The pawls and their recesses had not fractured, so if I could replace the spring I could reassemble the freehub body. The 50 tiny ball bearings in two sets of 25 were actually held in such a way that putting them back in place would be much easier than on a Shimano freehub of similar design.

Freehub ratchet springs aren't standardized. We don't have a drawer full of them. They're not a common salvage item when we part out a wreck. I'll tell you what though: they're going to be. This time I scoured the shop and racked my brain for something I could use. Ultimately I thought to dig in our bin of salvaged shifter parts, where I found a circular spring from a SRAM trigger shifter we'd parted out several years ago. We'd gone this long without needing it for a shifter. I snagged it to modify for the freehub. The shifter spring had two loops of slightly heavier gauge than the single loop of hair-fine pawl spring. But the diameter was perfect. I cut a section and test-fitted it. It was beefier, as expected, but I could turn the freehub ratchet without clenching my fist and gritting my teeth. I would have to reassemble the whole thing to know for sure.

The reassembled freehub had a stiff, expensive feel, and sounded like a star ratchet. The stiffer spring really snapped the pawls out. It only pushed the chain very slightly in the highest gears. Maybe it'll wear in. Their other choice would have been to wait for parts that may not be available for months. We might even start a little side business making faux star ratchets for people who want to boost their image in the riding group.

A mountain bike with shifting problems turned out to have, among other things, a tiny rock jammed in the pivots of the rear derailleur.

The penny is there to show scale.

The rock was inside the parallelogram as indicated by the arrow.

Fancy wheels on a road bike I assembled had very important information printed on both sides of the rim at the valve, in print so tiny you would need a microscope to read it.

Another customer had brought in an early 1970s Raleigh Super Course that he found in the house he's renting. He said he had always ridden mountain bikes, and wanted to try road riding. We discussed his options to get the old classic in rideable shape.

Check it out: ten speeds. And it has a cycle computer:

The geometry is a lot like the Cross Check. The frame has middling long chain stays and long dropouts. There's room for fenders above somewhat plump tires. The Cross Check has more modern hub spacing and room for wider tires, as well as canti bosses for powerful rim brakes, but its ancestor here has the general configurations to be able to ride a lot of what would be considered "gravel" today, as well as getting around more than adequately on pavement. This specimen is heftier than later versions because it's old enough to have the steel Stronglight crank.

In the late afternoon on Sunday, a couple brought in a Peugeot that had probably come from the European market in the early 1970s. It looked like your basic UO8 at first glance, but it had 700c wheels and an alloy crank. It still had the steel death rims with the totally useless pattern that's supposed to improve braking, but only makes it a little noisier. At least they appreciated its classic appeal. It's just a loaner while they're visiting family.

I come out of the work week totally thrashed. Days off melt away as I try to do all the things I don't have time and energy for in the margins of each work day. This morning I lay in bed feeling like I'd been poured into a mold and set up there. Bike commuting does take some of my energy, but even when I drive I seem to hit the ground running when I get home and fall into bed around midnight, with nothing to show for it. It's more of a determined stumble than  a run.

I'm sick of wearing a mask, too...

Saturday morning started on an up note when a guy who prunes trees for a living and took a biology class 20 years ago told us authoritatively that masks do nothing and that global pandemics are an inescapable hundred-year phenomenon. Any glance out the back window confirmed that the vacationing public agrees with him and is ready to let nature take its course. We face a high barrier in attempting to inspire widespread respect for the disease and for each other.

It's not just vacationers. The local mason who rebuilt the top of the older chimney at my house stated his own belief that H1N1 was worse and that Covid-19 is just like the flu. He is one of many who doubt the seriousness of the current disease, or who embrace the death toll as beneficial culling. It's all blown out of proportion by The Media.

The broadcast media have done their best to carry on the traditions of yellow journalism since the beginning of the Age of Infotainment began in the 1980s. I suppose it really goes back to the 1970s and the rise of morning news programs like Good Morning America. I'm old enough to remember black and white television and newscasters who sat there wearing a gray suit and a black tie and just presented the news. My father would get home from his government job and watch the six o'clock news before supper. It fit the mood of a world constantly on the brink of nuclear destruction. Simpler times. Now everything is elaborately produced and set to dramatic music. Half the people are sucked in by the effects and the other half are dangerously skeptical of absolutely everything they see. This does not produce a functional balance of points of view. It just rips us apart along yet another line of perforation.

Our shop will continue to observe precautions and endure being labeled as foolish cowards. Fine with me. We have a long way to go before we find out who was right. Even if there's a huge death toll, the survivors will still argue about whether that's such a bad thing. That debate has already begun.

Decades ago, in the 1970s, I was considering how I wanted to live in an overpopulated and polluted world. If we all did nothing, catastrophic events would probably take care of the problem. If, instead, we slowed our reproductive rate and simplified our lives a little, we could let less drastic attrition ease the numbers down. We could avoid the need for mass casualties. I didn't want to be one of them, therefore I should not ask anyone else to be one of them. It seems pretty simple.

That's not how it went.

The American experiment is more than just a political exercise to determine whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal can long endure. It's a complete submission to the forces of evolution. The complete dissolution of the republic is the natural conclusion of an obsession with personal freedom and the pursuit of pleasure. Some people will want a cohesive and supportive social system. Other people with legally equally valid opinions will want chaos. Opinion covers the whole spectrum between authoritarian monoculture and total disintegration. Mix it all together and see what comes out.

The mask debate makes life more difficult than it already was. Any venture out in public not only involves the basic risks of human contact, but the added risks of emotional reactions inspired by the mask itself. I'm really tired of wearing one, but it still seems like a partial defense. A partial defense is better than no defense. The latest hopeful drug, for instance, only reduces mortality by maybe 20 percent in the patients already sick enough to need respiratory support. That's hardly a magic bullet, but it indicates a possible line of weakness in the virus that researchers can follow further. There's even a story going around that COVID19 is weakening and will die out on its own. Is this information helpful when we have no idea yet why that would be happening and whether purposeful interventions have played any part? Someone who skims the headlines will see only that the already over-hyped disease really is just fading out by itself. Take that stupid mask off! Be a man!

The problem with a disease, especially one with a pretty long incubation period, is that you don't feel anything right away. Food poisoning hits you within hours. Someone sneezes on you and you feel yourself getting a cold within a day or two. A gunshot hits you right away. Same with a punch in the face. We can understand direct cause and effect perils much better than the invisible progression of a microbial invasion. We grow up learning about the dangers of fire, and falling off of things, and having things fall onto us, and drowning, and interpersonal violence. We can connect the dots when we see them. Micro-droplets of breath moisture that may or may not be infected don't seem real enough to excuse a change in behavior.

Summer has brought an increase in customers even as the bike industry remains unable to provide product. This means more people through the doors, and more arguments about the need for precautions. We've seen people come up the walk, look at our sign requiring masks, and walk away again without coming in. We've had the people with the mask under their nose, and even under their chin. We started renting bikes again, and have to recite our list of rules and procedures to everyone who inquires. Then we have to follow those procedures after decades of muscle memory based on the earlier, more casual process we used to follow. All the while, we do our best to give each other space during the long work day. We spend most of the time masked, and will continue to do so. It really cuts into my compulsive snacking, as well as the excessive hydration necessary to keep the kidney stones at bay. My nose is getting mashed down. And that's just in the sympathetic environment of the shop. I'm really tired of it, but that's not a good reason to give up.

All ignored problems are in crisis

The repairs in the queue at the shop are a metaphor for neglected problems. The pandemic bike boom has inspired millions of people across the country to dig out machines that they have ignored for years. It won't last, but for right now it devours time and resources. People are awakening to a need they didn't know they had. After a while, the furor will die down. Gas is really cheap right now, and businesses are reopening. Cycling will be forgotten again until the inevitable resurgence of infection leads to a new round of precautions. But by then we'll be going into winter, so commercial interest will swing to indoor diversions. By next spring we will be living in a very different world, though still beset by the same ancient human failings.

Before COVID-19 took over the headlines we were talking about the crisis in the environment. Then came the cold-blooded murder of George Floyd, and the country erupted in protest over the festering problem of racism and police brutality. Protests on that have flared up every time there is a high-profile case, but nothing gets fixed. This time, many good proposals are circulating to change the oppositional model of policing that combines lethally with underlying bias.

Change requires more than protest. It requires continuous and sometimes tedious contact with decision makers at all levels of government to keep them focused on more than just well-crafted words of inspiration for public display. But protest comes first to underscore the urgent need to fix this problem now. Consider how many times huge numbers of citizens have had to take to the streets just since the beginning of 2017. Every time they have been correct. Those issues remain acute. All problems ignored since the end of the 1960s are coming to a crisis at once.

I don't know what to do about the fact that some people are just assholes. We've all met them: the people who are looking for trouble. They are the result of many influences, susceptible to no single remedy. It's a human problem. In the idealized notion of a police force, our protectors in uniform are there to provide the muscle for citizens who are victimized by people who came to them looking for trouble. I have been grateful for sympathetic police officers a few times when they happened to be nearby in a confrontation with bullies in motor vehicles while I was riding my bike. I have also been stopped and ordered off of a highway by an officer who did not know -- and was in no mood to hear -- the actual laws regarding cycling on Maryland roadways at that time. As abuses of power go, it was nothing. I just had to wait for him to speed away and I could pull back onto the pavement and continue as I had been. It was 1982. The officer was black. We weren't hearing about police murdering people of color, or white people having any particular advantage in an arrest situation.

In my life I have been harassed by far more white people than Black people. This includes every event that crossed the line from unpleasant expressions of free speech to actual assault. If you say the word "criminal" to me, I imagine someone who looks like a redneck, or an untouchable dude in a suit. The vast majority of the people who have gone out of their way to be assholes to me have been "my own people." I would venture to say that "my own people" take the greatest pride in being assholes to other people. Is that what makes us "the master race?" Great.

It really hits home for bike riders when a racist, fascist asshole in full bike garb decides to be the terror of the bike path and brings national attention to himself as "a cyclist." All the news stories feature "cyclist" in the headline. Way to represent, dickhead.

While the protests and discussion center on the latest manifestations of the four centuries of white supremacy that have gone into the creation of our republic, our country's reprehensible approach to health care continues to burden all of us with higher costs and greater inconveniences as the novel coronavirus continues to spread. The systems of both personal and public health display more defects than competency. These defects, coincidentally, affect people of color more than white people. And the trouble and expense are just beginning, especially as Americans tire of the restrictions recommended to reduce the spread of the disease. They run out to mingle, feeling like they've paid their dues and deserve to get away with yet another indulgence. A young twerp came into the shop yesterday without a mask.  He insisted that he was fine because he "hadn't been sick with anything in over a year." He went on to say that we were "backward" up here for continuing to observe precautions when the rest of the country is opening right up. He did stand six feet away after moving outdoors at the shop owner's request, but he wouldn't don the free mask we provided to remain indoors to complete his business.

As racism and police brutality overshadow COVID-19, COVID-19 overshadowed climate change and all other attention to environmental rape and pillage. Atmospheric CO2 just hit a new record level, and this May was the warmest on record. Interwoven with all of this is income inequality and the injustices perpetrated by concentrated wealth. If individual citizens are to be allowed unlimited wealth, government by the people demands corresponding leverage by the government to rein in the excesses of the wealthy. Is that going to happen? If so, how? Money is the real power. Citizens who vote to give a government responsibility must also vote to fund the government to execute those responsibilities. Otherwise, power rests solely in the hands of those who can pay for it. That's un-American even by the original white male supremacist standards of the US Constitution. The dreamers who framed that document imagined a nation of free people who prized education and had a sense of moral decency. I don't mean morals in the prissy sense of sexual repression and self righteous piety. I mean genuine identification with the challenges that we all face as human beings. James Madison's expectation that the wealthy would appreciate the contributions and indispensable value of the less well-off was practically communistic. It was certainly naive.

The saying "what goes around comes around" is not true. If you are in the privileged class and wealthy enough, you can dish out far more than you ever take in return. If you bought the police force, you can reasonably expect to be treated as a preferred customer. If you have no empathy, no compassion, and no moral compass, you're nothing but a menace to society. This can be expressed through direct personal violence, but is often expressed far more subtly by the ways in which income is gained and funds are bestowed. You can look like a good citizen and a pillar of the community. You can look like a harmless, fun loving, downright liberal kind of person.

A lot of us harmless, fun loving, downright liberal people were somewhat blindsided by the resurgent power of open racism since the public gains of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Once the firehoses were put away and the dogs were kenneled and the police forces started to be integrated ("They call me Mr. Tibbs"), virulent racism seemed to be defanged. There were still jokes, but they seemed more like jokes on the racists themselves, until you tuned in closely. Or maybe we knew some people who just wouldn't be cured, but we perceived them as powerless vestiges of a dying system. Martin Luther King Jr. himself had believed that the arc of history bends toward justice. You wouldn't think so now. Or at least you'd have to admit that many more hands than we realized are holding its metal and doing their best to bend it toward segregation and social stratification.

All problems intersect. Industrialized resource exploitation leads to environmental degradation and warfare. Warfare and environmental degradation lead to displaced populations. Displaced populations make their way to safer places, bringing cultures into conflict. Colonizers export their beliefs to the lands they enter, bringing cultures into conflict. And some cultures are pretty unlikable if you envision a world where we can all be harmless, fun loving and downright liberal. Colonizers using kidnapped labor set up centuries of conflict in the lands to which they imported that labor. Consumerism leads to resource depletion. Consumers judge their consumption based solely on whether they can afford it monetarily, rather than analyzing its wider social and environmental impacts. What example do they have, after all? The wealthy have forever taken the best that they could afford because they could afford it. Only the exceptional few make prodigious efforts to give a lot back, and that's only after they've profited massively from business as usual. Those few do a service to their lesser-known economic peers who put out a lot less, because they create an image of wealthy generosity, and bring up the averages for the whole bracket.

Underlying nearly every other problem is the idea that it's a good thing to want to have as much as you can get, and to keep trying to get more. We have pity and contempt for people who can't stop drinking, or can't control their sexual urges, or who can't stop themselves from pilfering things in stores, or a host of other compulsions, but we make heroes and role models of the people who seize control of as much of the money supply as possible and then dribble it out to the rest of us at their whim.The best salaries go to the people who support that system. The common good is judged by what's good for the people who already have it good.

There's a deep fear that if we make life too enjoyable for too many people they'll just lie around and breed like rodents. They'll gnaw and burrow and proliferate out of control. The benefits of civilization have to be earned by virtuous toil at prices often set by investors looking to profit personally, not divide the spoils among all the working participants. This can be less true among genuine small businesses whose gross revenues don't allow for a lot of profiteering from the top. The basic cost of even a poorly paid employee takes a big bite out of a small operation's income. And a poorly paid employee might not be the best expenditure compared to hiring someone with actual skill and trying to retain them. This describes a challenge facing small bike shops as equipment gets more and more complicated, but revenues are stagnant or declining.

Why you can't make an appointment for service

We get asked fairly often if a customer can make an appointment for service, to guarantee same-day turnaround, like they do with their cars.

Cars are complicated, with a lot of systems that have to work together, but they have to be pretty well foobed not to work at all. The odds are good that a mechanic can do what you ask for and turn you loose until the next thing goes sproing. A mechanic might spot something crucial, if anything is crucial at that moment, but most of the time it's a matter of doing set procedures by the book. When those are standard maintenance procedures, it's really a matter of rote. Even if a less-routine repair is scheduled, a dealer or independent professional can have parts in the pipeline to cover predictable complications.

There are exceptions, of course.

Bike repair is all exceptions. The systems of a bicycle are much more lightly built, reflecting the abysmal power to weight ratio of the human engine, and they are much more interdependent. With rim brakes -- still the most common type -- a wheel out of true risks not only inadequate braking, but also a flat tire if the wheel wobbles enough to allow the tire to rub on the brake pads. Loose hub? Could be a bent or broken axle, not just loose bearings. Loose crank arm? It is quite likely to need replacement with an arm that is the same length, the right profile, and that attaches to the axle the same way as your old one. Your shifting out of adjustment could require complete replacement of the cables and housing, as well as internal procedures to clean out old factory grease. The factory lube in Shimano shifters is the leading cause of malfunction in older units. They want you to buy a new one. But because the bike industry keeps making things rapidly obsolete, finding a replacement part can be a treasure hunt in itself. Cruelly, this seems to happen to the expensive stuff more than the cheap stuff.

Nine is the loneliest number. For a brief time, nine-speed was the top of the line. Once it was supplanted by ten-speed cassettes, the industry stepped away from it completely, keeping eight, seven and some six as OEM spec, but abandoning nine altogether. Weird, huh? You can get some nine-speed parts, but they are the orphan step child of drive trains. The good news is that you can always convert to friction shifting, which allows you to run whatever you can cram in there. I cannot recommend it enough.

We might be able to set up for a same-day repair if we did a thorough examination of your bike on a previous day, but the time we would spend on that is time taken away from every other repair in the queue. It takes experience and knowledge to diagnose accurately. And a lot of the time you need to dig into it to see what it really needs and whether it can be done at all. Sometimes, disassembling a malfunctioning bike is a one-way trip, requiring that the repair be completed just to hand it back in a rideable condition.

We regularly do less than a bike should have, because it's all the customer is willing or able to spend. However, that is never done at the expense of safety. I hesitate to say this, but a lot of stuff gets done pro bono and unrecorded, just to safeguard the rider and to preserve some shred of profit from repairs that develop complications.

At the peak of mountain bike madness, we stocked a lot of parts. Riders were breaking a lot of things, and also looking for upgrades, back when you could still do that somewhat cost effectively. Eight speed was the top of the line, meaning that only two cogs separated the aristocrats from the lowest of the lowly rabble. Nowadays, the top stuff has 12 cogs, the average low end stuff has eight, but you'll still see some new stuff with seven. Super cheap bikes might have six. So that's four cogs between average low end and average high end, each with its own needs for chains, shifters, and derailleurs. Oh, and SRAM and Shimano use different actuation ratios on the shifters, so make sure that all parts that need to match are properly matched. This is true whether the bike is low end or high end.

Auto repair shops have either the resources of the dealership behind them or the highly developed network of auto parts stores for on-demand ordering and rapid delivery. Bike shops don't have that. We have a supplier one day away, and two suppliers two days away, with minimum order requirements and freight charges on every order. The supplier one day away has always been one of the weakest contenders on selection, and they seem to be vying to become more lame rather than less. Add to this the fact that most bike parts come from Asia. Between the trade war and the pandemic, it's surprising that supplies aren't more disrupted than they are.

On Saturday, the owner of an auto body and repair shop in town told me that her business is having trouble getting motor vehicle components because of the pandemic. She didn't say whether it was because of shutdowns in US factories or overseas sources. Maybe both. So for a while even the auto repair business can't necessarily oblige your need for convenient scheduling.

Any repair will take time. Someone somewhere might have written a rate book for standard bike repair procedures, but it should be shelved in the section marked "Humor." The lowly tuneup might take half an hour on a bike that was well assembled or at one time properly tuned, but more often blows out to consume more than an hour -- sometimes a lot more. Once we're in there, we can't just walk away. And we can't usually backtrack to the original crappy configuration of the bike when it came in. Even that would take time. We're better off, once we're going through hell, to keep going. See earlier reference to salvaging some profit from repairs that get complicated. Much of the time, you have to do the repair to determine whether you will be able to do the repair. Diagnosis and treatment become simultaneous, but that doesn't mean that either one was quick.

All these factors have led to the widespread practice in bike shops, that you drop your bike off one day and live without it as long as you have to, until the poor greasy bastards finally get it done and call you. As we shuffle the queue, we can often juggle the small jobs among the large ones, but any interruption will break the flow. If we have to play phone tag because we discovered expensive complications, we can't proceed until we hear back from the customer. If we keep having to stop and restart a job, that means taking the bike off the stand and setting it aside, or hanging it up, substituting another job in the interim, perhaps several times in the course of a repair, as little urgencies pop up during the day.

Some jobs are just a long slog. Suspension pivots, for instance. Every one has to be disassembled, the bearing extracted, new bearings inserted, with care and precision. That's going to tie up a technician and a stand for a long time. Once you've got that thing in several pieces, you don't want to yank it out of the stand. And our work stands are all optimized to the height of the mechanic who regularly uses it. Changing stands slows you down, because the working height is different, and the tools are all in a different place. It seems like a little thing, but you get used to flowing through a work station with familiar movements.

"How backed up are you on repairs?" someone might ask. The answer these days is about two weeks. We may do better, but we're not going to promise it.

"When will you not be so busy?" is the next question. When I say "September," they think I'm being funny or nasty. This year, of course, we can't really say. In recent years, a lot of the repair business has come from second-home residents and long-term vacationers. Who knows how much we'll see of them this summer. Camps have almost all shut down. But the customers are coming from somewhere. A lot of them are locals digging out bikes because they have the time. Once more people start going back to work -- for better or for worse -- they will be riding less. The whole thing could pinch off in an instant. We could be back to solitary contemplation of our debatable life choices. But that goes on in the background all the time anyway. Nothing really changes, you just get more or less of it at a given time.

Bike boom flash mob

The pandemic has sparked a nationwide -- and possibly wider -- explosion of interest in biking. I should take time to research this thoroughly, but I've been too busy dealing with the influx of repair work.

The abrupt rogue wave of biking interest threatens to swamp the bike industry, which had been declining steadily for years, fed only by interest in limited sectors like smokeless mopeds. Smokeless mopeds reflect the general trend toward lower numbers of unit sales and higher individual unit costs. The demands that new technology places on shops hit small, independent shops particularly hard.

A recent article in Forbes Magazine drew parallels between the 1970s boom and the present one. We must be in a boom if mainstream business magazines think it's worth filling column inches with it. But the author, Carlton Reid, is actually a bike person masquerading as a general transportation writer.

Reid blamed the failure of the 1970s boom in part on "cheap imports." Cheap imports? Can you say WalMart? For that matter, scan the floor on any bike shop today and you will see almost nothing but imports, cheap and otherwise. Even the boutique American bike builders rely on imported components, even if the brand name on them is technically American. In the end, the article does correctly state that the 1970s boom fizzled out because Americans simply lost interest. It tracks nicely on the way we lost interest in ethics and an inclusive society a few years later.

The bike business used to be an outpost of freedom. The machines were simple enough that shops could sell and service a lot of them with fairly low overhead costs, and individual owners could easily master the care and repair of their machines, if they were so inclined. The 1970s bike boom relied heavily on the public's interest in reducing petroleum use, and the sense of freedom that bikes represented. The fact that the Baby Boom was bringing the biggest surge of youth and optimism in human history didn't hurt sales, either. A lot of people were feeling frisky. Small shops were easy to start and could expand as needed to serve local interest.

The arc of the mountain bike boom reflected a similar pattern, but with the fatal flaw of rapidly mutating technology. In the 1970s boom, buyers were advised to buy a bike with the best frame they could afford, on which they could hang nicer and nicer componentry as their budget allowed. There was even a progression of upgrades: do the wheels first, then the brakes, then the drive train. Change the saddle to one that suits you. Dial in the stem length and bar width. Maybe you'd prefer to do derailleur and crank upgrades before brakes, because "brakes are just for stopping." Owners were encouraged to think of their bikes as just a starting point for improvement and personalization. When the mountain bike boom took off with the advent of integrated shifting systems and experiments in suspension, the things an owner could change incrementally dropped rapidly to nearly nothing.

The 1970s bike boom coincided with a recession. So did the late 1980s to mid 1990s of the mountain bike boom. This could have contributed to public interest in recreational transportation that didn't require the expense of fuel, licensing, insurance, and vehicle registration. As the economy took off in the later 1990s, complexity and expense of the bikes was also rising. And then in about 2000 the public wandered away again.

Expensive gasoline in 2008 almost brought us back. We saw a huge increase in bike commuting for about a month and a half. Our floor stock had already shifted mostly to path bikes, some road bikes, and a handful of low end mountain bikes, reflecting the kinds of inquiries we were getting from our clientele. Anyone who had kept mountain biking after the boom busted wasn't even asking us anymore. We didn't see those customers until the last couple of years when they suddenly re-emerged, expecting us to have carried a torch for them during their long absence. And they hardly constituted boom numbers at best.

If you take a starving person and stuff them with food, they will probably die. If you take a hypothermic person and suddenly rewarm them they will probably die. If you take a moribund industry and suddenly slam it with consumer demand, it may not die, but it won't be able to sustain a boom. Add the fact that production and distribution were already disrupted by the coronavirus and the boom falls off a cliff as soon as stock on hand sells through.

On the repair side, we are inundated, and none of the repairs are cheap and quick. It's a classic example of how you can be working your ass off and still lose money. We don't outright lose money on each individual repair, but the time it takes to make it reduces the margin we can devote to overhead expenses and necessary re-supply. Many of these bikes look like they were buried in someone's back yard for several years and were dug up only because a quarantined person was rototilling for a garden and hit them. Or they were under an inch of greasy dust in the back of a garage. Or hung under a dripping plumbing pipe in the basement. Mixed with these are the beloved steeds of regular riders who want them back as quickly as possible.

In our first few days of contact commerce after weeks of locking people out I can confirm that customers are a great way not to get any work done. Yesterday was our first Saturday with the doors open. We sold almost all of our remaining assembled floor stock of bikes, which meant that no one was doing any actual wrenching a lot of the time. Customer interaction is made more cumbersome by the need to mask up, sanitize, and maintain distance, but without the precautions brought on by the disease we would have more people in the store, and added demands like rentals. And a few people have been fractious or irate about the precautions. That hasn't blown up into a full-fledged incident yet, but we're only talking about a few days so far.

The fact that we are busy gives some people the mistaken impression that we're making bank. Far from it. We haven't been able to fill stock on bikes, clothing, and other categories that help support the needs of the store. We haven't sold anything but the few bikes we managed to get from the incomplete fulfillment of our preseason orders. Repairs have required special ordering a lot of parts, which means we get pounded on shipping. You may get free freight on your consumer internet purchases, but businesses have to fork out. We are probably subsidizing all that free freight for the retailers who are destroying brick and mortar commerce.

Summer income will be diminished by the sensible restriction of travel and interaction. Then comes the usual doldrums of autumn, followed by a winter seriously in doubt. Our winter business relies entirely on human contact: ski sales, ski rentals, lessons, and ski services for people going to areas where people gather in crowds to use their skis. Winter tourism relies on lodging, dining out, and squeezing into buildings when not out in the cold air. As badly as we are hurt by fickle weather, if people can't even show up it won't matter how good the trail conditions are.

If the ski business is a complete bust, I would push heavily to get people to bring their bikes in for real in-depth service when we have time to dig into it and they don't have the urgent desire to get out on them. Complete overhauls are not cheap, but I can assure you that an annual "tune up" is not adequate to take care of the inner workings of most bikes. This would also be the time to get your suspension pivots rebuilt, and all the other time-sucking minutiae of modern bike ownership. It's all part of the cost of ownership. Would such an appeal work? I don't know if we'll even get to make it. And if we get a ski season, winter is the worst time to bring bikes to us.

For now, we just have to get through the current wave of demand.