You Know You’re A Commuting Cyclist When…

1. You know every pothole on your route, and could ride the whole way without hitting a single one, with your eyes closed.
2. You still ride around the potholes that were fixed months ago. To the drivers behind you, this behaviour is as inexplicable as the motion of the planets before Copernicus.
3. Within ¼ of a mile from home, you’ve assessed the wind, and can predict your arrival time at work to within 15 seconds.
4. You are fatalistic about headwinds. You just know that the morning’s headwind will have swung 180º and doubled in magnitude by the time you start for home.
5. On days when you drive you miss the banter at the lights.
6. On days when you drive, you wave and sound your horn at other cyclists. Mistaking your friendly camaraderie, they give you the finger.
7. Your boss has asked you to use the bike racks outside / in the basement, instead of parking your bike next to your desk where you can keep an eye on it.
8. He / she lost that argument.
9. He / she thinks they won the argument, but is unaware of the Brompton you keep under your desk for when you just need to pop out for a few minutes.
10. You have more clothes at work than at home.
11. On at least one occasion you’ve mis-counted your at-work store of clean underwear, and have ended up going commando for the day.
12. On that day, you had a meeting with the CEO / managing director / important customer, and somehow found yourself telling them about this.
13. On at least one occasion, a colleague has found an item of your underwear somewhere in the office.
14. When colleagues start bitching about petrol / gas prices, they start scowling at you as if it’s all somehow your fault. Don’t they know that higher fuel prices also affect the price of porridge oats?
15. Weight Watchers points are useful in working out how much you need to eat to keep the weight on.
16. You know which secretaries / engineers have a store of cookies in their desk drawers that you can obtain by letting them look at your legs for a few seconds.
17. The person with the petty cash tin sees you coming and has the change for the vending machine counted out by the time you get to their desk.
18. You have a tub of chamois cream at work. You keep it in the fridge.
19. A colleague once mistook your chamois cream for their cream cheese.
20. You found out that beer is 250 calories a pint, which means you need four pints to fuel an hour in the saddle.
21. You once tried to drink an entire week’s worth of fuel in the preceding weekend. But having lost all your body fat, this ended in disaster.
22. If you forget to drink enough water during the day & on the ride home, then a small glass of wine with dinner is enough to leave you with a killer hangover in the morning.
23. Your YouTube home page is full of videos by Magnatom et al. You spend hours watching these, and can anticipate the problem they’re filming before it’s actually shown, at least 80% of the time.
24. In the winter you have ridden more than a mile of your route to work on slick tyres before you realised that there was a heavy frost last night and the roads are covered in a sheet of black ice.
25. You seriously considered just carrying on.
26. You’re clean shaven in the summer and have a beard in the winter.
27. If you are a woman, you envy male cyclists’ winter beards.
28. At least once, you’ve not had time to let the ice thaw before an important meeting, and have taken a pair of scissors to your beard. No-one said a word about the result.
29. You have been shouted at by taxi drivers. Regularly.
30. You break the speed limit at least twice a day.
31. On both occasions, a bendy bus will try overtaking you.
32. You are horrified at all the broken glass in the cycle lanes.
33. You have considered carrying a broom with a cut-down handle handle tucked into your rack, to deal with the broken glass in the cycle lanes.
34. You don’t ride in the cycle lanes anyway - they’re too narrow, rutted, full of potholes & wobbling gutter-bunnies, and covered with broken glass.
35. Your U-Lock is at the bottom of your bag. That’s the best place for it, as idiot drivers give you too many temptations to use it, and criminal damage is an offence.
36. Carradice saddle bag. ‘Nuff said.
37. Your Wiggle account’s main delivery address is to your office.
38. You’ve managed to sneak off to your bike during the day to sort that annoying rattling noise before the ride home.
39. You have fixed a puncture while at your desk.
40. You have a selection of patches in your wallet / purse.
41. You also have a tube of glue in your wallet / purse.
42. You have a full tool kit in your desk, including crank extractors, chain tool, torque wrench, various lubes & lotions.
43. There is a track pump under your desk.
44. You are bored with your life. Seriously - you see the whole damned thing flash before your eyes at least twice a week when some idiot behind a wheel does something stupid / inconsiderate / aggressive / careless. You’ve seen it so many times now that while all this is going on you can momentarily tune out to run through your shopping list in your head, wonder if these are the best tyres for this time of year, make a mental not to call your mum, etc.

Filed under: Bike Culture

Tags: cycle commuting, list, Silly Stuff