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self-important building manager
Monday, August 16 1999
When I ride my bike to work, I normally lock it up for the day to a thin chipped-white painted metal pillar supporting a covered walkway leading up to In Cahoots, a country-western bar adjacent to the building where I work. This pole is virtually the only place anywhere near my workplace convenient for locking bikes. As I've said before, those who developed San Diego assume people arrive and depart in automobiles. Parking lots are everywhere, but bike racks are rare, especially in recently-developed Mission Valley.
Recently, though, a metal rail was installed along the edge of a sidewalk leading into a sister building in the office park. Today after a lunchtime bank errand, I decided to lock my bike to this rail as a change of pace. As I did so, a tall, fussy-looking white man in a suit & tie approached me from the building, telling me I couldn't do such a thing, that this was a handicapped access rail. Since my bike was on the outside of the rail from the sidewalk, I knew the man was just making up excuses in an effort to get me to park my unsightly rusty Huffy somewhere else. As everyone knows by now, I don't take kindly to such efforts. I think bikes are one of the few things worth salvaging of modern life, and anyone who disagrees, anyone who thinks I should lock my bike elsewhere, is in for an argument. "Oh yeah?" I asked him as I angrily fumbled with my keys, "What are you going to do?" The tall fussy man replied (in the otherworldly voice of someone who didn't wake up this morning expecting this sort of confrontation) that he'd be getting his groundskeeper to come down and cut my bike loose and haul it off. I completely ignored him and finished locking the bike (in the otherworldly manner of someone in a dream, which is how this whole altercation felt to me). The tall fussy man was standing right in front of me by this point and reached out an ineffectual hand to tap my handlebars. But it was too late. "Smart-ass!" he swore quietly as he walked back into the building. "Having trouble with the wife?" I asked with calm concern. "No..." he replied, unprepared, then he added, "I'll just have to get my building man to cut your lock." His voice was weak enough to make me feel a twinge of empathy for him.
I left my bike there for a good ten minutes or so and then went back and moved it after I felt I'd proved my point. I couldn't risk losing it. (But if I had, I'm certainly aware of the fact that the windows of office buildings aren't difficult to smash, especially in the still of a late night of ASP/SQL coding.)
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