Ding Dong....

The shop is dead. What happened? I left for a week, and returned to.... nothing. No repairs to do. No one coming in to buy bikes. It's like mid- winter in here, minus the cold. Wait, the phone just rang.... just someone wanting to know if we buy bikes. Answer: NO! ...and no I don't know who does. Actually, I do, but I'm not telling them.


Instead of doing something lame like putting together another comfort bike, I decided today to figure out why our Xtracycle had a non- functioning headset. I put it in the stand and took the fork off only to find that the lower headset bearing was not even there. I had to laugh about that one. You might wonder who would put a headset back together without including one of the bearings, but I already knew the answer. We used to have a kid that worked at the shop when he was in high school. His name was Mike, but we all called him only by his last name: Douin. Why? because it was funnier, I guess. We had some fun times with that kid, because he knew where he ranked in the hierarchy of the shop: dead last. I get all teary- eyed (with laughter) when I remember all the good times we had shoving him in the trash can (headfirst) when he screwed something up. Or the time when his friend bought a part from a competing shop and Matt told them (straight- faced) that the only way to make it right with him was to kick each other in the groin. Douin volunteered to "take one for the team" and gingerly kicked the friends' leg, prompting us to call "foul" and forcing him to repeat the action. Which he did. Then it was the friends' turn, and he must have been a former soccer player, because his foot landed squarely between Douins legs, sending him to the ground in pain, and the rest of us to the ground in uncontrollable laughter. Why he felt he needed to go through with that, I'll never know, but I guess that's just the kind of guy he was. Douin was indeed a ding- dong, a bonehead, but he knew his place, and we could function together knowing that. He took the bikes out of the boxes and I put them together. He cleaned up dirty repair bikes and I repaired them. Knowing your place in life is difficult for most people, at least it is for me, but we all must accept our station in life weather it is temporary or permanent. Sometimes you have a job to do, and you just have to do it, no matter if you like it or not. Hopefully, you can find something interesting or rewarding about the job, and that makes it worth it in the long run. I often feel like maybe I should be doing something more with my life than fixing bikes, but I haven't yet figured out what that is. Until then, I'll just keep doing what I do to the best of my ability and try to be satisfied with that. I really feel pretty good about my place in the shop right now, and I can be sure of that... because my co- workers have never once tried to shove me headfirst into a trash can.