Interesting morning so far….all I need is for them to sack me this afternoon (which I’ve just got that strange feeling that they’re going to do – no one is looking me in the eye today; like being a cow in an abattoir and no one can look at you directly....). Then the day will be complete and the weekend will be off to a rollicking start.
The Owner took the opportunity to have a go at The Administrator of the biking group yesterday via MY e-mail account...and I got a message in my e-mail account at 22.38 last night from The Administrator with a relatively pissed-off message (which I’ll copy and translate once The Owner gets finished with payroll....the spreadsheet is up on the only computer we have in the office with Internet, and I don’t want to make a bad situation worse by being seen to be nosy about payroll.) Now I’ve gotta write The Administrator back and say, OK, I wasn’t here yesterday afternoon, sorry that she used MY account to have a go at you – I understand where you’re coming from, but she doesn’t....
Now El de la Bici, the guy who’s basically the brains behind the biking group who was supposed to be here at 10.30 to meet and say hi, has blown off the meeting. And he didn’t even call himself: he asked LaPi, who’s his sidekick in the group, to call on his behalf. The Owner says not to read too much into it. And I ask myself, what, El de la Bici works in an office with no Yellow Pages? Why does he have to call LaPi to call us when he could just call the store directly. Straaaange.....
Oh my God, this job is turning into Grade 8 all over again. I can’t wait to get paid for September and then next week I’m going to tell her, forget it, I’m out of here as of November 16th. And oh yeah, I’m not going to be in on the 26th and 27th ‘cause I’m going on a press junket.
Then again, maybe I won’t have to – maybe she’s lining up my final payments as we speak and as of 8:00 tonight, I’ll be singing Freebird.
Then again then again....my past experiences of wanting to be sacked from jobs I’ve never liked has always resulted in some stupid thing that keeps me here longer – a raise, a promotion, something like that. It’s like trying to get away from a guy you’re dating who you don’t really like. Any gesture you make towards freedom results in an equal and opposite reaction of the employer working harder to keep you on board. Or at least it has in two jobs.
“Third time’s the charm,” wrote Tolkien. No hay dos sin tres, (“two always results in three”) says the Spanish expression.
Who knows.
Saturday, September 30, 2006
Thursday, September 28, 2006
The only bike fiesta in Spain that's a guaranteed shit storm
So it's the time of year for Fiesta de la Bicicleta, which is organized by the COPE, the Catholic Church's radio station. I am no fan of COPE; neither is The Owner. I find their attitude towards anything that's not distinctly pro-Franco kind of nauseating. However, they are the main promoters behind the one-day "Fiesta de la Bicicleta", so there's gotta be SOME kind of good going on there; they could just can it altogether. So I post the information on the PedaLibre group message board, figuring that people might be interested.
OOOOOHHHH NO. TFS. (Ouch! Sorry.) All of a sudden a shit storm ensues because apparently, because (TFS....) no one talks to anybody about anything that could be improved. No one turns around to the COPE and says, Great Event! Know what would make it even better? Why not do it every month? No. Instead, they're all sitting like little kids at their computers, sending off messages about what jerks and child molesters the priests at the COPE are, and that everybody should avoid them...
On the one hand, I understand where the protests are coming from. That the City Council decides to make one universal gesture towards cycling every year in order to shut everybody up and to try to make political hay from it is cynical at best. It would seem counterintuitive that the most conservative radio station in the country would support an activity that’s generally associated with fairly progressive politics. And you’d think that, for one day a year, the drivers of Madrid could behave themselves and give everybody else space: they do it for the Saint Sylvester Half-Marathon, organized by Nike every December 31st; they do it for the Vuelta; they’ll do it for the Cabalgata de los Reyes, which is the Spanish equivalent of the Santa Claus Parade. But there’s something about the Fiesta de la Bicicleta that just makes Madrid residents see red. They can’t get over the idea that they’re being asked to sacrifice the streets for half a day, and cyclists get hit, they get verbally abused, they’re told to stay off the roads....and we’re talking families getting threatened by cars, not some dreadlocked kid trying to BMX his way down the Castellana off the hoods of every BMW along the way. (Though one can understand the temptation.)
At times like this, rather than pull out TFS, you have to take a deep breath and remind yourself that the cultural changes that many other societies went through just didn’t happen here. They didn’t have the riots of ´68 or the petroleum crisis of ´73; many of the mistakes and issues which we’ve learned how to deal with (the do’s and don’t’s of activism, for example) are things that are only starting to come to the forefront now. It’s natural, I suppose, that the antagonism with which things get done here will not go away easily. That Javier Solana, a former Spanish Minister of Defense, is head negotiator with NATO continually blows me away. But there’s some hope as well: If Javier Solana can become a reference for negotiating skills, why can’t the Pedalibreros?
Especially since we’re talking about an event that the folks at the COPE aren’t wild about organizing. It’s great publicity, but it’s a pain in the ass to organize, and The Owner told me (I don’t know if this is true or not) that the woman who organized the event last year had a miscarriage after everything was over. So why wouldn’t they want more help with it? Establish the rules first, make the first one a real success, and then ride on the success of that by amping it up. Have a Fiesta de la Bicicleta each month in a different area of town – Chamberí, Tetuán, Carabanchel, Vallekas – getting the people in the biking organizations in each part of town in on the act. Where are the good place to do biking and tapas? What about community arts groups?
And this is where being North American kicks in because you start realizing that there are other options, that you don't have to accept things just because someone says they have to be that way.
Things will always change slowly if they're going to change for the better.
But it was really hard not to think of some of those guys - and I'm not being sexist, each and every one of them was of the male persuasion - and NOT think of my Grade Five teacher, Margaret Rupert....
"KNOCK IT OFF, OR I'M GONNA KNOCK YOUR HEADS TOGETHER, YOU BUNCH!!!!"
OOOOOHHHH NO. TFS. (Ouch! Sorry.) All of a sudden a shit storm ensues because apparently, because (TFS....) no one talks to anybody about anything that could be improved. No one turns around to the COPE and says, Great Event! Know what would make it even better? Why not do it every month? No. Instead, they're all sitting like little kids at their computers, sending off messages about what jerks and child molesters the priests at the COPE are, and that everybody should avoid them...
On the one hand, I understand where the protests are coming from. That the City Council decides to make one universal gesture towards cycling every year in order to shut everybody up and to try to make political hay from it is cynical at best. It would seem counterintuitive that the most conservative radio station in the country would support an activity that’s generally associated with fairly progressive politics. And you’d think that, for one day a year, the drivers of Madrid could behave themselves and give everybody else space: they do it for the Saint Sylvester Half-Marathon, organized by Nike every December 31st; they do it for the Vuelta; they’ll do it for the Cabalgata de los Reyes, which is the Spanish equivalent of the Santa Claus Parade. But there’s something about the Fiesta de la Bicicleta that just makes Madrid residents see red. They can’t get over the idea that they’re being asked to sacrifice the streets for half a day, and cyclists get hit, they get verbally abused, they’re told to stay off the roads....and we’re talking families getting threatened by cars, not some dreadlocked kid trying to BMX his way down the Castellana off the hoods of every BMW along the way. (Though one can understand the temptation.)
At times like this, rather than pull out TFS, you have to take a deep breath and remind yourself that the cultural changes that many other societies went through just didn’t happen here. They didn’t have the riots of ´68 or the petroleum crisis of ´73; many of the mistakes and issues which we’ve learned how to deal with (the do’s and don’t’s of activism, for example) are things that are only starting to come to the forefront now. It’s natural, I suppose, that the antagonism with which things get done here will not go away easily. That Javier Solana, a former Spanish Minister of Defense, is head negotiator with NATO continually blows me away. But there’s some hope as well: If Javier Solana can become a reference for negotiating skills, why can’t the Pedalibreros?
Especially since we’re talking about an event that the folks at the COPE aren’t wild about organizing. It’s great publicity, but it’s a pain in the ass to organize, and The Owner told me (I don’t know if this is true or not) that the woman who organized the event last year had a miscarriage after everything was over. So why wouldn’t they want more help with it? Establish the rules first, make the first one a real success, and then ride on the success of that by amping it up. Have a Fiesta de la Bicicleta each month in a different area of town – Chamberí, Tetuán, Carabanchel, Vallekas – getting the people in the biking organizations in each part of town in on the act. Where are the good place to do biking and tapas? What about community arts groups?
And this is where being North American kicks in because you start realizing that there are other options, that you don't have to accept things just because someone says they have to be that way.
Things will always change slowly if they're going to change for the better.
But it was really hard not to think of some of those guys - and I'm not being sexist, each and every one of them was of the male persuasion - and NOT think of my Grade Five teacher, Margaret Rupert....
"KNOCK IT OFF, OR I'M GONNA KNOCK YOUR HEADS TOGETHER, YOU BUNCH!!!!"
Monday, September 25, 2006
Requiem for an LBS, part 2
The Owner used to be a shrink. This is not the advantage it would seem to be, as you're never entirely sure if you're being manipulated or she's geniunely unsure if she should ask you something. And the tone of voice she uses is so precise to that one thing that no sooner has she opened her mouth than you know EXACTLY what is going to come out:
"But P.! How are we going to...."
There's no way of being able to capture in words (well, I could, but it's not the point of this blog) the sing-song-y helplessness, the moué of an ex-smoker's mouth, that she does this with. The look of helplessness that should not belong on the face of a woman who wears a ton of eye makeup and no blush or lipstick. It makes me yearn for the bitchy bosses of the past who did not hesitate to make it clear that what they wanted and when they expected it by. WHAM.BANG.WHOOP. There it was, loud and clear: "Get me the phone number." Like a REAL boss would do....
Instead, what I got this morning was a little-girl-lost look and what was either a very, very wimpy chewing out or some milquetoast attempt at regret: "You should have been at Festibike yesterday, giving out pamphlets to all the families that were there...all the mothers with kids." Festibike is basically the Madrid version of the Banff Bike Festival - any mom who takes her kids there probably bikes up the southern end of La Pedriza park and the Sierra de Guadarrama before breakfast. Either that or she's been hauled there by her husband. And I would have just been one more person handing out publicity bumpf. I can't think of a worse way of publicizing something that's NOT meant to go for the biking crowd. We should be approaching community groups, not some harried housewife who's trying to distract her eight-year-old from the Extreme BMX demonstration. And I'm sorry, but I do NOT work seven days a week for someone else. I made that very clear right off the bat.
She probably thinks I gave up hope. I'm not even sure I had it in the first place.
"But P.! How are we going to...."
There's no way of being able to capture in words (well, I could, but it's not the point of this blog) the sing-song-y helplessness, the moué of an ex-smoker's mouth, that she does this with. The look of helplessness that should not belong on the face of a woman who wears a ton of eye makeup and no blush or lipstick. It makes me yearn for the bitchy bosses of the past who did not hesitate to make it clear that what they wanted and when they expected it by. WHAM.BANG.WHOOP. There it was, loud and clear: "Get me the phone number." Like a REAL boss would do....
Instead, what I got this morning was a little-girl-lost look and what was either a very, very wimpy chewing out or some milquetoast attempt at regret: "You should have been at Festibike yesterday, giving out pamphlets to all the families that were there...all the mothers with kids." Festibike is basically the Madrid version of the Banff Bike Festival - any mom who takes her kids there probably bikes up the southern end of La Pedriza park and the Sierra de Guadarrama before breakfast. Either that or she's been hauled there by her husband. And I would have just been one more person handing out publicity bumpf. I can't think of a worse way of publicizing something that's NOT meant to go for the biking crowd. We should be approaching community groups, not some harried housewife who's trying to distract her eight-year-old from the Extreme BMX demonstration. And I'm sorry, but I do NOT work seven days a week for someone else. I made that very clear right off the bat.
She probably thinks I gave up hope. I'm not even sure I had it in the first place.
Saturday, September 23, 2006
Requiem for a Local Bike Shop (LBS), part 1
I don't know how I didn't notice the dirt before. It wasn't like there were huge dust bunnies lurking under the bikes or anything like that, but there were small things - remainders of cobwebs hanging from the spotlights, a thin film of dust on the frames of the bikes, made even more noticeable because many bikes these days are painted in a dark, matte finish...
And then yesterday, when they started moving the smaller mountain bikes and the hybrids downstairs, I noticed in a big way how the walls were badly dented, how pockets of dust would gather in the loops of packing tape that the guys would use to put posters up on the walls. And some of the posters they'd mounted were from companies the store hasn't worked with in years - GT, Colagno, Cannondale. At some point Short and Blonde had decided that the best way to attach the posters to the two pillars holding up the catwalk - there's a catwalk that takes over two-thirds of the main floor, and no one over a size 48 can move comfortably through the other side of the store - with packing staples. I mean, at some point, he must've taken a staple gun and just *WHAM!* straight into the gyprock. There was no getting them out of the wall except with a letter opener, which just made the gouges worse.
I don't know if it's because I know that I'm leaving on the 16th of November or I'm just getting sensitive about the issue of cleaning because my room-mates are so bad at it. But everywhere I look now, these signs of neglect, of the store being unloved, become more and more obvious.
The windows that are not getting washed. The tire marks on the ceiling. The scattered ficus leaves which don't get picked up every morning. And, the thing which gets me the most, the main display window which has two torso mannequins - one with a long-sleeved Trek/Volkswagen maillot (€90) and another with a €135 Castelli jacket. And on the window ledge, between both mannequins...a handful of dead mistletoe and four dead flies. It's been that way for at least two months. And it's the metaphor for the store: it looks good at first glance, but what you see after a prolonged glance isn't ugly or tragic...it just makes you think about what could be achieved if anyone there gave a damn.
The Owner says that she calls the place "The Ministry" because the four people who still work there - Short and Blonde, Tall and Dark, Cuca and Yisus - know that, whatever little work they do, they'll still get a paycheque at the end of the month. Fucking the dog, as it's indelicately called in Canada, is hardly a uniquely Spanish tendency; everyone's done it in a job at some point in his or her life. But it saddens me to think that the small things, which are not that difficult to do, are the things which customers may be picking up on these small things and deciding to go elsewhere. The Owner says that she gets depressed when people go to Decathlon (the French sporting-goods superstore) to buy their bikes. Well, Decathlon is clean and the staff make an effort to find you what you need. If they don't have it, they'll get it. And you find lots of interesting other things that you are happy to spend your money on. I cannot say those things about my store.
An example: A friend mentioned over wine last night that she'd be interested in a CamelBak pack (we're thinking about going for a long weekend in December, packing light) but she wants one with a bit of storage space (liner shorts, deodorant, food) and in any other store, they would have gotten on the phone and asked, or made a note to call the supplier and let her know on Monday. Not Short and Blonde. He made some noises about maybe calling the other suppliers on Monday to find out, so I told her, look, just to go this other place because they'll have it. She's now the proud owner of a cool, fun CamelBak for the trip. And I'm considering going there to buy one for myself, because I know that hell will freeze over before Short and Blonde actually picks up the phone.
Now, if they're going to do that with friends of the business (as they're referred to in Spanish), who they could get away with a bit more cheekiness - why shouldn't they do it with regular customers? And I'm sorry, but there's no room for that. And I don't want to be part of a business that couldn't give a damn.
And then yesterday, when they started moving the smaller mountain bikes and the hybrids downstairs, I noticed in a big way how the walls were badly dented, how pockets of dust would gather in the loops of packing tape that the guys would use to put posters up on the walls. And some of the posters they'd mounted were from companies the store hasn't worked with in years - GT, Colagno, Cannondale. At some point Short and Blonde had decided that the best way to attach the posters to the two pillars holding up the catwalk - there's a catwalk that takes over two-thirds of the main floor, and no one over a size 48 can move comfortably through the other side of the store - with packing staples. I mean, at some point, he must've taken a staple gun and just *WHAM!* straight into the gyprock. There was no getting them out of the wall except with a letter opener, which just made the gouges worse.
I don't know if it's because I know that I'm leaving on the 16th of November or I'm just getting sensitive about the issue of cleaning because my room-mates are so bad at it. But everywhere I look now, these signs of neglect, of the store being unloved, become more and more obvious.
The windows that are not getting washed. The tire marks on the ceiling. The scattered ficus leaves which don't get picked up every morning. And, the thing which gets me the most, the main display window which has two torso mannequins - one with a long-sleeved Trek/Volkswagen maillot (€90) and another with a €135 Castelli jacket. And on the window ledge, between both mannequins...a handful of dead mistletoe and four dead flies. It's been that way for at least two months. And it's the metaphor for the store: it looks good at first glance, but what you see after a prolonged glance isn't ugly or tragic...it just makes you think about what could be achieved if anyone there gave a damn.
The Owner says that she calls the place "The Ministry" because the four people who still work there - Short and Blonde, Tall and Dark, Cuca and Yisus - know that, whatever little work they do, they'll still get a paycheque at the end of the month. Fucking the dog, as it's indelicately called in Canada, is hardly a uniquely Spanish tendency; everyone's done it in a job at some point in his or her life. But it saddens me to think that the small things, which are not that difficult to do, are the things which customers may be picking up on these small things and deciding to go elsewhere. The Owner says that she gets depressed when people go to Decathlon (the French sporting-goods superstore) to buy their bikes. Well, Decathlon is clean and the staff make an effort to find you what you need. If they don't have it, they'll get it. And you find lots of interesting other things that you are happy to spend your money on. I cannot say those things about my store.
An example: A friend mentioned over wine last night that she'd be interested in a CamelBak pack (we're thinking about going for a long weekend in December, packing light) but she wants one with a bit of storage space (liner shorts, deodorant, food) and in any other store, they would have gotten on the phone and asked, or made a note to call the supplier and let her know on Monday. Not Short and Blonde. He made some noises about maybe calling the other suppliers on Monday to find out, so I told her, look, just to go this other place because they'll have it. She's now the proud owner of a cool, fun CamelBak for the trip. And I'm considering going there to buy one for myself, because I know that hell will freeze over before Short and Blonde actually picks up the phone.
Now, if they're going to do that with friends of the business (as they're referred to in Spanish), who they could get away with a bit more cheekiness - why shouldn't they do it with regular customers? And I'm sorry, but there's no room for that. And I don't want to be part of a business that couldn't give a damn.
Sunday, September 17, 2006
You either get it, or you don't. Y PUNTO.
Another cycling job; another boss who doesn't ride. What the hell is up with this?
I don't expect that people who work for large accounting firms are able to calculate their grocery bills without using calculators; but the number of people who work in cycling who don't actually ride bikes continually surprises me. Shocks me, actually.
I'm in the same situation again; another job, hired by someone who superficially claims to be interested in developing cycling; but, in the end, just wants to keep her business afloat. Not that there's anything wrong with that; but why would you spend weeks griping about throwing good money after bad for a project that has to develop, for something that wouldn't make money until at least six months after you start it ... if not a year....
Let's not kid ourselves: if you don't ride, if you don't actively take part in the community of people who genuinely like bikes, you aren't gonna get it. If you don't take part in community groups that work on cycling as an issue, and work to develop cycling in the city, you're not going to get it. The contract runs until November 23rd and I don't think I'm going to renew it - not because I don't want to be part of a project that is a big risk (that's exciting any way you cut it) but I don't want to be part of a money grab for a company which, frankly, would have been better helped by spending the money on a marketing coordinator who could have pinpointed the mistakes being made in the marketing plan. Or even developing something that resembles a marketing plan. (One particularly telling example: everybody knows about this establishment - it IS the oldest bike shop in Madrid - but if you ask Madrid people to tell you exactly where the store is located, more often than not you get a blank stare. That should tell a store owner something.
The vast majority of people get into physical activities because it gives them something deeper than a trip to the mall does. Cycling is about more than money, and if you don't ever get on your bike - and in a store that employs eight people, only two of us ride. That's not a good sign. More fool me: I didn’t pick up on that before I started working there, but I’m really noticing it now. Almost no one in the store rides, talks to other cyclists in a non-commercial environment, nad couldn't tell you what cyclists are thinking; perhaps they know what they want to buy, but again, they just don't Get It.
So I'm back to Square One again, and the song which is on my MP3 right now is "Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. And that's exactly how I feel now: I tip my helmet to the new revolution, but in spite of being as big a gear freak as they come, I’m not exactly in this to propogate a consumerist point of view (though if you can make money at it honestly without screwing people around, more power to you.)
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