It's Best To Focus On The Positive

Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I'm a very lucky cyclist because the company I work for has a huge basement area in the building that's card access-controlled and which has a small area in it set aside for employees' bicycles, including two bike racks. This is an incredibly fortuitous thing for the company executives to have agreed to (years ago, and continually), and I know this because I have a friend who works elsewhere in the city, has to lock his bike up out on the street, and has had two bikes stolen in the past several months! So at no point do I ever lose sight of what a good thing it is that I have here!

Having said that, my bike has ended up in my cube for part or all of the last two days in which I biked! On Monday it was because the access-controlled door in the basement apparently broke such that you couldn't turn the handle from the inside, meaning that if you went in there and let the door close behind you, you couldn't get out! Now it's not all that dire, as there's a phone in the storage room, and you could quickly call for help. But of course whoever came to help would have to have a card with access to the storage room (about 1/10th of the employees do, I'd estimate) as your card would be with you on the wrong side of door! So when I heard about this, on Monday afternoon, I immediately took a buddy down (to hold the door open) and we removed my bike and put it in my cube until quitting time.

Today, I arrived at work after a vigourous twenty-five minute ride at around 2 degrees Celcius, went to the basement only to find that someone had closed and locked the outside door (which is always propped open, and which takes a key, not a card, to open). So back I went to the elevator and off to my cube, to store my bike there all day. I complained about it but no one could figure out who'd closed and locked the outside door. I'm told it's open now but I kept my bike in my cube just in case (I'd have had to take the bus home today if my bike had been in there and the outside door was locked). Something wacky is going on!

The only other similar experience I've had, prior to this week, was a few summers ago when we had the big blackout in this part of North America. I had thought that Tammy and I would be laughing after going down the stairs to the basement, because I pictured us cycling home past all the backed-up traffic (everyone was heading home and none of the stoplights worked) and being able to go for a swim half an hour after leaving work. Instead, after we discovered we couldn't open the basement door with the power out (duh!), we ended up walking home and it was almost an hour and a half before we got there and could take a cooling swim.

So I guess nothing comes without a price.