I'm no good with bikes. I'm so no good with them that I buy a couple a year. Repairs are beyond my skill, energy, and usually time, so I generally just buy a cheap old bike (£30 or thereabouts) ride it til it falls apart - which happens in an absolutely literal sense more often than you might think - and buy the next cheap one. You might think it ends up being false economy, but generally I'm in the plus column, although it does seem that the next bike always falls to bits at a point when I really don't have the time to start walking to work again. Not including the train part of my journey, the walking bit of each day is nearly two hours. It can be a massive exhaustion throughout the course of a week, not really leaving any time for things like food, and sometimes sleep.
Anyway, last month, I paid slightly more for a bike. It was still second hand, but I was certainly shelling out a bit more than usual. Generally speaking, it was worth it: it was clearly a bit of an expensive bike in its previous life, and much, much lighter than any of my previous bikes. Much lighter than all of my previous bikes, all together, in fact. That being the case, it's a much smoother ride, and much more pleasant to use. Well, it was. I had to get it repaired last week because of brake problems, etc. It wasn't a particularly expensive repair, but still one that I could ill afford. And this week: the pedals have started dropping off. The problem is that the nut of each pedal has become completely smooth on the inside, meaning that the threads have entirely gone. There's no purchase, no grip. So I ended up walking home (well, to rehearsal) tonight. It's very annoying, particularly as I don;'t see it getting repaired until next month. That's next month, for crying out loud.
I think what annoys me most about the pedals is that it's a simple thing, designed to do only one thing, incapable of doing that one thing. A single function item that fails at that function. How disappointed its parents must be. I get annoyed by this sort of low achiever quite often. I have to wear cuff links each week for the Ghost Walk, and I find them annoying out of all proportion. But at least with cuff links, they are clearly quite awkward items in the first place, as the job of putting them on would be made much easier if you just had an extra hand. It's the other things that exist in spite of their obvious design faults that really annoy the hell out of me. Chief amongst them is the tray on the back of seats in Southern Railway trains. Who the hell decided that they had to have that awful, squealing metal against metal shriek when you pull them down? Or indeed, up? Because these things are designed. They go on drawing boards and the like. There's very likely some kind of prototype mocked up, so that the client can see what their money is being spent on. At no point, did nobody raise a hand, no matter how shyly, and suggest that perhaps passengers didn't actually want the sound of hell accompanying their journey home? The trays on the trains wouldn't have survived one week of The Apprentice.
Which suggests only one, somewhat sinister option. That it's all deliberate. That these things really are sent to try us. That everything is designed with the specific intention of keeping us in a constant state of annoyance and tension. This would explain a great deal. Like the Daily Mail, for instance, and Jeremy Kyle.
No comments:
Post a Comment