When the weather is pleasant, my wife and I spend our Saturdays riding our beach cruisers all around town. The pedaling is good exercise for our hearts; however, our bicycle cruises are a bit hard on our livers as we tend to ride from one local bar to the other. Every ride needs a destination, and our favorite destination on a Saturday is a local tavern.
On our bicycle trips, I handle the job of parking the bikes and locking them up. Over the years, we have tried letting my wife park her own bicycle, but inevitably the bike is facing the wrong way and her basket is crashing into my bike, and the bike lock cable isn’t long enough for two bikes in that particular configuration.
The bike lock is a cable with a carbon steel U-lock that uses a self-assigned four digit code to open. Since my wife is a math teacher, the code we picked for our bike lock is 9-9-8-1, which stands for 9 times 9 equals 81, simple and easy to remember.
Yesterday we were happily cruising from one bar to another like any other Saturday. As we approached our next destination bar, my wife saw a co-worker. She stopped to talk to her friend. I knew that stop meant the two ladies would probably chat about math for quite some time. I wasn’t good at math in school, and I didn’t particularly want to listen to work talk about math so I continued on and parked my bike. I locked it, 9-9-8-2, and headed into the bar.
I knew eventually my wife would finish her conversation about math, park her bike next to mine, lock it in, and then join me at the bar. What I didn’t know was that my wife, whom I love, would have some technical difficulties with the bike lock. I didn’t know she would unknowingly switch the bike lock into “combination setting mode.” I didn’t know that she would randomly flip all four of the different number dials to a completely unrecognizable number. And I didn’t know she would then lock our bikes, spin all four numbers again, thus setting the stage for us to have no possible way to unlock our bikes from a heavy, metal gate. She unknowingly changed the combination to our bike lock.
My wife eventually came into the bar, didn’t mention anything about the lock, and we drank many beers. After a while, the sun began setting and we needed to start bicycling home. I went to unlock our bikes, and I noticed right away the lock wasn’t set at 9-9-8-2.
I said, “Wow, you are really worried about bicycle security, changing all four numbers.” That was when my wife informed me, “I was having problems with the lock. It wouldn’t lock no matter what I did to it. I couldn’t get it to actually lock until I flipped that small switch on the bottom.”
No … no, no, no!
“Baby, that switch is only changeable when you have the correct combination plugged in, then you can change the combination on the lock. If you changed the combination, then what was the combination you put in?”
“I don’t know. I just started moving all the dials to try to get the bikes locked. The lock wouldn’t lock.”
“Well, honey. It’s definitely locked now! The bikes are now locked here forever. You’re a math teacher. How long do you think it will take to roll through 10,000 different bicycle combinations?”
That was when she informed me that the whole thing was my fault.
“If you had just been patient and waited until I finished talking to my co-worker, then you would have locked the bikes and this wouldn’t have happened.”
“So, it’s my fault you changed the combination to our lock?”
“Obviously.”
The solution to our problem was to go to a hardware store, buy bolt cutters and destroy our own bicycle cable. Essentially, I had to steal my own bikes back. Happy hour was $4 a pint. Bolt cutters set us back $50.
Rob is currently on 1,546 of 10,000 different bike lock combinations. To read more from Rob Krider or to contact him go to robkrider.com.
This article appears in Apr 4-11, 2019.