Facebook has an inordinate amount of information about our lives and its officially for sale. I just saw the following ad on my homepage…
Now, granted it’s brutally simple to figure out that that ad might be appealing to me based on my self-identification as Christian and Single, but that’s ot to say that the process can’t/won’t become much much more powerful. The amount of knowledge they have about me is truly enormous, heck this blog automatically gets uploaded to Facebook.
Last week I mistakenly left my bike on campus overnight and my front light was stolen. I was unconcerned, as Alfonso had generously given it to me (he found it on the trail) and I have another one in my apartment. This is however not the point of this post.
At roughly 11pm I rode my bike on to the University of Texas campus. I locked the bike to a rail adjacent to the McCombs School of Business using what is admittedly too short a lock (it can go through the frame or a wheel, not both). At roughly 3:40am I walked out to find that not only had the front wheel been stolen, but also my front fork. Oddly, the thief had decided that my handlebars were not worth stealing, so he was carrying an alan wrench, but not wire cutters?
This has me curious, is there some place that I don’t know about that actually purchases used mountain bike parts? What could that store think they were doing other than fueling bike theft/vandalism? Who do they sell these forks to if not the very people from whom they were stolen? Are the stolen parts shipped to China where they are assembled and used by somebody whose financial situation does not allow them to worry about details like where the parts came from?
Bah, it’s 4 am and I’ve accepted a job offer and haven’t used the bike for its intended purpose in many months. Thief, if you’re reading this I hope my mountain bike fork brings you a measure of contentedness tainted with a dash of inconvenience, as your act has brought me.