Be Better Locked Than Your Neighbour

This joke’s a metaphor - stick with it ’till the end:

Two guys are on safari, and camping out in a tent. Suddenly, a lion sticks his head through the tent flap, and says, “Roarrr! I’m a lion, and I’m hungry, so I’m going to eat one of you! But I fancy a bit of sport with you first, so I’ll give you ten seconds’ head start. Go!” (lions can all talk in jokes).

One of the guys just panics, and starts crying, whimpering for his mummy, and stuff like that. The other dives into his rucksack, and pulls out a pair of running shoes, complete with elastic laces (he’s probably a triathlete - what do I know?) so he can get ‘em on real quick. His panicking friend looks up, and wails, “What’re you doing? You’re never going to outrun a lion!”

As he legs it out of the tent, the guy with the running shoes on calls back over his shoulder, “But I don’t have to outrun the lion!”

Just in case you’re slow on the uptake today:

He. Only. Has. To. Outrun. His. Soon-To-Be-Eaten. Friend.

It’s a tough world out there, but what does this mean for YOU? Well, there’s pretty much no such thing as a theft-proof lock. Even the highest rated devices you can buy are only supposed to slow a thief down - forcing them to take a couple of minutes to defeat, rather than a couple of seconds.

A pessimist would assume from this that there’s no point in locking your bike up at all.

Not true.

What you have to do is make sure that your bikes in a nice, visible public place, and ideally near as many other bikes as possible. Then make sure that its got a better lock than the other bikes, and that the lock is used to make it as hard as possible to get tools in there to defeat it.

Bike thieves are evil, good-for-nothing, scumbags, but in general they’re not completely stoopid. So given the choice of your bike, which’ll take a couple of minutes hard work in public, or some other guy’s ride parked next to it, that’ll need five seconds with a pair of wire cutters . . . most theives will go for the easy option.