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Bike Woes

// November 28th, 2006 // Personal

I’m having a spot of bother with my motorbike at the moment.

The short version (the long version is the same but with a considerably higher expletive count) is that I was on my way back home last night and found myself faced with a new BMW, with new xenon headlights and a complete inability to find the dip-switch.

As this reduced my visibility to approximately nothing I slowed down to let him pass. Unfortunately, as I was approaching the car (and therefore the blind spot created by his uber lights) I was unable to see a series of large and pointy stones lying on the road… and hit one. Front tire goes pop!!!

I got lucky – I was already moving more slowly than I would have been and so was able to keep the bike upright and coax it to the pub car park (some 250 meters away) before the front tire ran out of air completely. Had I been moving at 40mph then I would certainly have taken a tumble but then I wouldn’t have needed to go so slowly if it weren’t for the tit in the beemer and I would have seen the rocks in time to avoid them.

So thanks to a combination of the quarry’s inability to transport rocks without dumping them all over the road and the BMW driver’s inability to stop wanking for a second and dip his head lights I’m looking at a £50 haulage fee to the garage, another £50 for a new front tire (the old one was only 2 months old) and about £50 in labour.

All of this during a time when I’m on a seriously tight budget and have Christmas to contend with… bugger.