The Story

All the years I've been riding motorcycles, folks have been telling me horror stories. Not stories plural, really: A story. The Story.

I hear The Story from all kinds of people, everywhere I go. They come at me in gas stations and at cafe cash registers and motel desks, anywhere I'm standing with my helmet in my hand. The Story's always the same: Something horrible happened to someone they know (or know OF) because of some damn motorcycle.

Their brother (cousin, buddy, minister) lost his or her (limb, memory, girlfriend) in a fiery crash that wasn't the brother's (etc.) fault. An inattentive motorist turned left in front of the brother, cousin, buddy or minister as that blameless soul rode to the local shelter to deliver a hot meal to the homeless.

The accident is always serious, always crippling to the rider. It is never the rider's fault. What you take away from hearing The Story is that such tragedies are inevitable. If you ride, innocent and careful though you may be, you will be hurt. Bad.

I'm used to hearing The Story. I've heard it 1,000 times. So has every other veteran motorcyclist.

I don't expect a version of The Story from bicyclists, and I REALLY don't expect to hear anything like it in bicycle shops from bicycle salespeople. Why turn people off to cycling, when cycling is your livelihood? When cycling is what you have to sell...

I'm in this shop. The owner begins to tell me The Story, the cycling equivalent of the blameless brother story. It's about a confrontation between a driver and a cyclist. It's pretty much the same every time.

The shop owner's Story was as long and detailed as a Russian novel or Shakespeare play. It had fewer characters but was just as heavily laden with overheated emotion and fatal character flaws.

There was the driver who came close to the cyclists, and the passenger who threw something at the cyclists. There was the inevitable red light just ahead and the volatile but strangely calm conversation at that light, the explosion that might have happened but didn't.

You've heard 1,000 such stories if you've been riding since the first of the year.

About a third of the way through his Story, meaning what seemed to be about 45 minutes into it, a woman walked into the store and approached us, the store owner and me. She wants help, I thought.

But no help was forthcoming: Two-thirds of the never-ending Story remained to be told. So the woman stood there, three feet from the store owner, while he described the cyclist's macho posturing, the driver's macho posturing, the same-old confrontational clichés...It was awful.

She stood there; I fidgeted and wished I were anywhere else. I thought: What if she's here to see about a road bike for her kid?

The story makes the roads here in small-town northern Cal sound like battle-lines in war-torn Bosnia. She may imagine soldiers in net-covered helmets scanning the horizon through the tinted glass of their Chevys, ready to pounce on small, vulnerable groups of cyclists.

Is she wondering what items drivers will throw at her son or daughter? Will there be a face-off with some motorist every ride? Is she wishing she'd signed the kid up for martial arts classes instead of viola lessons?

Eventually, the story wound to its predictable conclusion: The clever cyclist made the angry driver feel foolish for about five seconds. That particular five seconds of embarrassment has been recreated in song and story God-knows how many times over the 15 years since it happened.

That Story's been told as often as the one about the fall of Troy. Oh. You may know a similar Story you tell now and then. Please remember how I hated listening to this guy's Story. Resist inflicting your Story on others. Thank you.

While he told me The Story, the shop owner did not, could not, meet the eyes of the one person in the store who mattered: the woman customer.

If he HAD met her eyes, she might have caused him to pause in his Story-telling. She might have asked him a question or expressed a need he'd have to deal with. Maybe she wanted to buy something.

Any experiment with customer service, no matter how brief, would have interrupted the damn story. Unthinkable.

I promise: I did not make any of that up. Happened just as I described in a shop not far away. Probably happens where you live.

As I said, you hear the motorcycle story everywhere, too, but you DO NOT hear it in shops, told by people who sell or service or in whatever-way make their living from motorcycles. Folks who LIKE motorcycles and believe they are fun and safe and life-enhancing don't tell The Story.

Why in the world would a bike business person tell such a similarly poisonous story, especially with a customer listening? Baffles me.

We just don't "get" customer service in the bike biz, don't understand it. We're too self-involved. We're caught up in our own Stories, in our own definitions of cool. We are too quick to make judgments about strangers, and to treat them by standards we hated when we were green and they were applied to us.

We're almost never in the moment, standing there on the shop floor doing our jobs, doing what's right for cycling, asking the nice folks what we can do for them.
END