Advertisement ::

Enlarge Cartoon

I have always had a symbiotic relationship with my motorcycles

Geneva, Switzerland – One morning last week, I woke up to find my neighbor taking apart his motorcycle in the parking lot in front of our building. Before I had a chance to say good morning, he looked up and said, “You’d better check out your bike, they almost got mine last night.”

I lifted up the cover on my motorcycle, and sure enough, some miscretin had cut clean through the main ignition wire, and shaved two more in an aborted attempt at making off with my bike.

I have written about my symbiotic relationship to every motorcycle I have ever owned; I felt sick physically, and pure rage, imagining the butchering of my bike. Theft always draws an emotional response, but rarely have I felt such raw anger for an anonymous nemesis. Or maybe it was the anonymity that drove me crazy, the complete inability to charge anyone.

I spliced the wires back together with the kind help of my neighbor whose solidarity took a bit of the edge off my anger (they succeeded in hot-wiring his bike but a nearly dead battery saved the day), turned the key, and nothing.

For two days and nights I walked around obsessed, ready to annihilate anyone caught in the vicinity of my bike.

After three days of changing fuses and futzing with the ignition cables, I called a garage (Allianz Suisse covers transport of a downed bike) to tow my bike to the shop. Unfortunately, I have forgotten the name of the garage, because the driver who showed up was first rate.

A dear friend restored to health

The first thing he asked was if I had checked the battery – yes. And the fuses? – yes. Kindly, but with a bit of seasoned skepticism, the mechanic began fiddling with the battery cables, eventually pulling on the positive cable and revealing an in-line fuse, which he promptly popped out and held up for inspection – “cassé,” he announced.

We threw in a spare fuse and my baby fired up, like a dear friend recovering from a bout of laryngitis.

During the three days I had been fuming over my incapacitated bike, I received kind assistance from a number of sources including my neighbor, the garage mechanic, and an on-line community of bike owners.

The lesson was clear: expect a few anti-social SOBs to ruin your day now and again, and count on the goodwill of those around you to make it somehow seem trivial.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.