“I bought this bike, so I could ride it. I don’t want to learn how to fix it.”

The skinny fuck bicycle repair man looked at me with one eye half closed, the other dimmed — the universal face of nobody gives a flying fuck.

“Un-huh,” he said.  As he rolled my precious carbon-fiber Trek with the electronic shifting to the back room.  It was going to be two weeks before I could get the precious back.  

I hate to admit how much I paid for this bike. Let’s just say when my lying nazi bullshit diesel got rear-ended with the bike on the back, the insurance company repaired the car without batting an eye, but freaked out at covering the cost of the bike.

More money — more problems. Cheap bikes last forever — hardly ever go to the shop. The $5k kind demand attention, new parts and “precision.”

Fuck.

The bike had stopped shifting. I removed the battery, charged it, set it perfectly back into place — nothing. This was the second fucking time in 4 years that I “broke” the electronic shifting… The first time, I snapped the little plastic lever with my little fat fingers.

Trek replaced it on warranty but warned me that it was “user error,” and they wouldn’t do it again. God damn over-engineered piece of crap, you touch it gently and it snaps like a skinny fuck’s collarbone.

This time I was gentle. All levers still in place.

Three hours later, Global Bikes called.

“Your bike is ready.”

Shit. No “real” problems get fixed this fast. This is going to be embarrassing.

It was.

“You bent the wire,” skinny fuck number 2 said. “I bent it back and it worked just fine.”

I could feel the eyes of all in the shop looking around to see what kind of an idiot would bend a wire and not bend it back. Their eyes all landed on me simultaneously. The peer pressure was greater than their combined weight. Skinny fucks.

“No charge,” they said. It was a pity repair.

If they can’t save my dignity, they can at least save something from my wallet. I’d like to think my dignity costs more than $50-$150, but this time I’ll take the cash.

When I bought this machine, I knew biking was a skinny man’s game. Signing up to be a fat biker, I put myself in a minority. I had no idea that it extended all the way down to my fat fingers. Bending a little wire turned a 20-speed, 21st-century prize of engineering into a single speed, 19th-century piece of shit .

One bend and 8 months later, we are still in the modern era, and the bike is working fine. The same cannot be said of my fragile male ego or pride. You can bend those back, but unlike the wire, they will never be the same.