Our Community Bikes is a great concept. Conveniently located a quick 10 minute walk away from where I live between Fairview and Mount Pleasant here in Vancouver, it is essentially one-part bike parts recycler and seller, one-part bike tool sharing workshop, and one part roving bike maintenance skills class. Their model is essentially that they have some bike stands, and you can choose one of three ways to pay for your time in their worksop: $5 an hour if you don’t need any assistance, $10 if you’re only getting verbal advice, and $15 if you’re getting detailed hands-on instruction (with a $50 option if you hand them your bike and say, “Fix it, please!”).
I bought my current bike at OCB. I love the bike. I learned a few things when I got it to start fixing it up, like putting in a fresh set of ball bearings on the wheels, new tubes, and some fidgety things with the gears. Just the basics, nothing overly fancy, though given I was learning from scratch and am not a nuts-and-bolts tinkering type, it probably took me a lot longer than it might take many other people. But I’d be lying if I said the experience was all cakewalk and roses.
I’m far from blaming OCB solely for the unpleasantness of my experiences. As a non-profit, I can say with some confidence that they are likely understaffed and overworked; but they are generally good humoured and encouraging about it, and as helpful as they can be. But it’s pretty much hellish everytime I go, and part of writing this post is to diagnose why that is.
I went today because my bike tube suffered a puncture and I wanted to get an opinion on what to do about it. Looking at the tube this morning, it was clear from the indentations that it’d been weakened through contact with the spokes. The rim tape on my wheel is quite thin (and I had put it on myself at OCB when I first bought the bike), so I figured I’d hop by and get an opinion on whether I should replace the tube, and what to do about the rim tape.
So I hopped over, signed in, and asked for that quick opinion, which was to put on what I think is called a rim protector. I was handed something that looked like a giant red rubber band, and verbally instructed on how to put it on the wheel. OK. A few minutes into trying to do this, I noticed that the protector seemed to be really way too small for my wheel. I brought this up with a second staff person, who quickly replied me that it was supposed to be tight-fitting. But this was ridiculous — I felt like I’d have to break the laws of physics to get this thing on. Meanwhile, I was getting my fingers painfully pinched between the wheel and the rim protector, getting frustrated, and feeling stupid because I was doing something I disagreed with. It was probably around this point that I tweeted:
How do I keep from feeling utterly victimized every time I go to our community bikes???
I’m aware that I have a well-documented problem with asking for help, so doing this helped wake me up to the fact that I really did need help, and found someone who looked unbusy and asked for it. One staff member tried to get it (the rim protector) on with me; it wasn’t working. A second staff member (the one who’d told me it was supposed to be this way) finally committed to helping me get it on. Armed with two screwdrivers, we did it — but it was all twisted and folded as a result. She suggested I use some needlenose pliers to fix it. I spent another 10 minute trying to do that. Meanwhile, the staff are occasionally mentioning why they’d chose the rim protector — the shop didn’t have tape the width of my wheel. Then the first staff member, the one who’d suggested the rim protector, took a look at the wheel and took off the badly-aligned rim protector. The rim protector was now ruined, and he took it off the wheel because it was clearly the wrong size.
…Oh. You mean like I first thought 30 minutes before that?
He ended up putting another layer of rim tape on top of the rim tape I’d put on last year. I bought a new tube since the old one was clearly weakening in a number of spots due to the spokes. And then I finished and paid up, an hour after I’d signed in and a lot longer than I’d intended to be there.
Check the wording of that tweet up there again. Who’s the actor in that question? ME. I should emphasize: I do not feel that Our Community Bikes is necessarily at fault for me feeling victimized. That doesn’t mean there aren’t things that they can improve on, but I endeavour to take responsibility for making sure that the things I think and act keep me from feeling this way. My reading of this particular situation is that I lacked the confidence in my own assessment of the rim protector situation to respond to the second staff member to go, “No really, it’s not just tight, it’s wrong.” And so ensued another 20 minutes of trying to get it on.
So that’s why I feel victimized when I go to OCB — because yes, I am a beginner, and yes, there are a lot of things I don’t know how to do, but no, I’m not stupid, and I usually make things worse when I allow myself to act or think that I am, which somehow gets really easy to do when I’m there. I genuinely lack confidence in my ability to do many of the tasks — for instance, I needed a reminder on how to put the tire and tube back on the wheel. Because I do this once a year, so my hands and my brain are going to forget. But where’s the middle ground between the correct amount of support and autonomy? My learned helplessness in this area is strong, as this also affects how I interact with my brother in this too. I could probably get more Foucaldian about this, but there’s got to be a way of doing this so that the fact that I lack the knowledge or the skill to correctly apply it doesn’t cause me to shrivel up and sap my value as a human being.
I would just like to be able to go to OCB just once and not leave every time without fail feeling lucky I hadn’t burst into tears. I don’t have an issue with spending hours on end trying to install ledger using MacPorts on my Powerbook, so I don’t think it’s an issue of me across the board not being able to tinker with things in order to figure them out — yet being in that place regularly makes me feel stupid. I cook and I sometimes draw and make things with my hands, so I don’t think it’s just a matter of not being comfortable with getting my hands on it, even if I do have to say “righty-tight lefty-loosey” once in a while. Perhaps I’m just not being patient with the fact that things take a really long time, coupled with anxiety about breaking it, and the diluted attention of how few people are there. It generally feels way more dignified to learn with the book my brother gave me at home. I don’t think that has to be like that.
I think there’s a base level of skills with how things work that you need to have in order to feel comfortable participating in the learning. And I don’t have it (yet). And some people don’t have that base level of comfort with cooking, or computers. These are all tasks that people routinely excuse themselves from and can make other people almost cry. So fixing my bike in that particular place is mine.

