My bike had been in for its six week service. I went to the shop to pick it up but when the man went down to get it he seem confused. "Did it have anything on it?" he asked.
How did he mean? Like a tiny mouse trying to reach down to the pedals with its actually not much shorter than my legs?
"What?" I said, instead of the mouse thing which might have confused him.
"You know any lights or anything. They've forgotten to label it."
"Oh, just a lock," I told him. He wheeled up a bike that looked like mine, though obviously there was at least one of the same make and model down there as that was written on my docket.
"Yeah, that looks like it," I said. it had a lock and the same light fittings and was the same colour. But it's a new bike and there weren't any distinguishing marks to prove it.
"Plus you owe me ten pounds and one pence. Look, the man who sold me the bike added the bill up wrong. I will let you off the penny though."
"Well spotted," said the man with a hint of regret in his voice, as if this was something they do quite often in this shop, but most people don't notice. "Well spotted" - not "Oh dear, what a silly mistake." You see what I am saying. If they make an extra £10.01 for every bike they sell they would only need to sell three bikes to make £30.03. And so on. Up to infinity pounds infinity pence for selling infinity bikes. As if infinity pounds wasn't enough for these criminals. They wanted to double their booty by having infinity pence as well.
At the very best all I could conclude was that the men in this bike shop were incompetent. One had overcharged me. One (a different man yesterday) had failed to label my bike. Now this third man (the manager incidentally) had given away his bike shop scam by saying "Well spotted". None of them were coming out of this well. But what could I say? All three of them knew that
I had capitulated to Al Quaida. i was the worst idiot of all. How they pitied me. They deserve an extra £10.01 for having to deal with idiots like me.
I wish now that I had insisted on getting the penny back too. I think that would have helped me claw back some dignity.
I rode the bike home. It seemed to be more difficult to get on than it had previously, and seemed to be running a whole lot more smoothly. The gears had scrunched a bit before, but now each change was smooth and noiseless. "Wow, I am glad I had that free service," I thought to myself, "This is almost like a different bike altogether."
When I got home I checked the seat and realised that it was higher up than before. "Well," I reasoned internally, "presumably the man who serviced the bike, raised the seat so that he could ride it himself to check it was OK and he forgot to return it to the short-arse position that I require it to be at. Yes, that makes sense." I left it at that.
I left the bike in the hall and went about my day (going to post some posters for my forthcoming
yoghurt gigs, going to the gym then going to the British Library to work, but then playing Civilisation II all afternoon instead like an idiot).
When I got home I had made my dinner and was heading upstairs to watch TV while I ate it (against the advice of Paul McKenna and his "I Can Make You Thin" TV series). I looked at the bike in the hall. It looked a bit different than usual. There seemed to be stencilled writing on the bits of metal that hold the front wheel on the bike (I don't know what they are called - but that thing from yesterday is a piping bag or piping nozzle). I looked more closely. I didn't remember those at all and from this angle it looked like a different bike.
As I ate my dinner I put it all together in my head. The incompetent staff, the missing label, the raised seat, the improved performance, the new stencils. It seemed increasingly likely to me that I had been given the wrong bike - one with the same lock on it as I have, but that's not that big a surprise as it's the lock that the salesman recommended, so doubtless he would have recommended it to another customer too. I'll have to take the bike back in tomorrow, I thought wearily. It wouldn't be that big a deal, but what if the person whose bike it acutally was had already picked up my bike? I would have to wait for him to return that bike to the shop. He might not even be clever enough to realise. And what if I got my bike back and it didn't perform as well as this new bike? Should I just keep this similar but superior bike and enjoy my bit of luck? Would that be unethical? Well, yes. Would I be caught? Possibly, but it wouldn't really be my fault and I could plead ignorance. Plus there was always the chance that this was my actual bike anyway. For all I knew it was. So I wouldn't even really have to lie.
Then I realised the drawback in my plan. If this wasn't my bike then the lock that was attached to it was not mine either. Which would mean the key I had would not fit it. Which would mean I would have to pay another £24.99 (or £35 if I got the original sales assistant) to buy a new one. I wasn't prepared to make that sacrifice, because it would mean going back to the shop anyway and it was the sheer laziness of not wanting to return that was making me consider this insane heist in any case.
But I realised I now had a way to prove once and for all if the bike was mine. The key was literally the key to all this. If the key fitted the lock then this was my bike. If not, then it would be time to return to the bumbling idiots who had caused this situation.
It wasn't like I needed the proof. I had convinced myself that this wasn't my bike.The evidence was insurmountable. There wasn't a bike court in the land that wouldn't judge that this bike was not mine. Mainly because there are no bike courts in this land. But even if I was in Holland - the home of the bike court- then the bike jury would come down unanimously on the side of this not being my bike. The seat, the transfers, the confusion, the gears. It was a watertight case. As watertight as a traffic cone with its piping nozzle stuffed with a watertight sock.
I went down to check though. And sure enough I coudln't get the key in the lock. QED. Case closed. But to be fair I am always trying to put the key in the wrong way round (not upside down, I don't put the handle bit in the lock, I am not an idiot - you know just turned through 180 degrees) so I tried the other way.
It fitted and the lock sprung open. But I was by now so convinced that this wasn't my bike that I couldn't make sense of it. I concluded initially that all that brand of lock could have the same key. This would be a terrible thing to come out in the open for them. Sales of their locks would plummet thanks to this money saving cheat. But then I realised it was more likely that in fact like a modern-day Prince Charming (except more bike based) I had found my actual bike was the bike that I had been given back.
I think this story goes to prove that we as human beings are very capable of taking evidence available to us, adding two and two and making five. It's why I am glad we have a jury system (you know unless the government thinks that the accused person is probably guilty and then we don't bother - which is fair enough) and why I will be fighting for bike courts to be introduced to this land as soon as possible. I could have made a terrible error.
But now I am wondering - what if the mechanics at the bike shop had taken both locks off the bikes to play bike lock quoits or something and put them back on the wrong bikes when they were finished? It's possible. Only that could explain how I didn't recognise my own bike.
