7 years I’ve been living in Croydon. Almost the entire time I’ve been grocery shopping by bike. I’d roll the bike into the stupormarket and lean it up inside because I hate locking bikes and I felt it was safer inside anyway. Besides, my only (cough) good lock was at work anyway. So after almost seven years of bringing a bike into this place you can imagine my shock when some new security guard tells me to take it outside. Of course I’m immediately arguing with him about it.
“I don’t want to leave it outside!”, “I don’t have a lock!”, “I’ve been doing this for years with no trouble” and he gives me the “I’m a cyclist too” line and proceeds to explain to me what a fucking U-lock is. I left in disgust and leaned the bike up outside returning to buy some strange food products (strange because they’re not in a packet, ready to be nuked – holy crap! hippy’s gone au naturale! ;)).
On the way out, the guard that usually works there – who I’ve been saying “g’day” to for frickin’ ages – tells me that some fuckhead rode into the centre, ignored requests to get off his bike, and proceeded to knock some poor woman down!
So now it’s crackdown time and I get rolled because of what some fucking moron has done. Stupid peds on the road is one thing, but don’t frickin’ ride into their territory and knock them down!!! I’m going to have to assume it was some ‘burb-fucked chroming bmx grommet but I could be wrong. Thanks to whoever it was – I love my life made more difficult.. cock smoking tool.
It’s lucky I’m listening to “Lou Reed – Satellite Of Love 2004 (Dab Hands Retouch Mix)” or I’d be really mad! 😛
*sigh*. Similar story, been commuting to work for over a year. Storing the bike in the office, no problems. Then some busy body (we don’t know who, yet) claimed it was a OH & S problem, so out they go.
OH & S?!! What is this nanny state coming to? I guess they were afraid they might walk past it and come down with a case of fitness or something.
Shock Horror!
"Mr HR Man.. I just walked past the bike and felt my heart rate rise – It’s too much to handle!"
Did you have any say in the matter? My bike has been in the main entrance of my office for 5 years now.
What if you made the same complaint about photocopiers being "in the way"?
I’ve stubbed my toe on a fridge lots of times – should they be banned?
Well, considering most of the members of manglement drive the most offensively large 4WD’s (wanker tankers..) I’d say we have very little hope.
When walking our bikes in/out of the office they stare at the few of us that cycle (only 2 regularly out of about 40 people) as if we are some new life form that just crawled out of the primordial mud.