Greasy fingers

Recently I've been going back and forth to the bike mechanic. For those of you think mechanics are only for cars, let me explain. Like car mechanics, bike mechanics often have tattoos. Like car mechanics, they could be called gear heads. They are usually skinny guys who may or may not have black rimmed glasses. They are more likely to be listening to indie rock or public radio than heavy metal. Like car mechanics, they have greasy fingers.

These things hold true whether your mechanic is in Hannover or in St. Paul (and likely other places where i have never lived). But in St. Paul, I had the best mechanics ever. Several of them may or may not have had crushes on me (as I've mentioned before, I do well with nerds). And if they didn't, I got a discount anyway. I rolled into The Bicycle Chain and they did whatever I asked. Once a year I took our road bikes in for spa treatment. My mechanic boyfriends took all the components apart, gave then a bath, lubricant, exfoliation and probably a massage and put them all back together shining like new.

In Germany, I have found no bike spa. There is no bath, no massage and no discount. It's more like taking your bike to the dentist's office. When you take your bike to the shop in Germany you've gotta make an appointment. Would you go to the dentist without one? Depending on the time of the year, your appointment might be 2 or 3 weeks out. If you want to go to the one bike shop in town with a mechanic who's a native English speaker, be ready to stand in line for over a month. None of this is cool when your bike is making noises or not shifting gears right now. When you have your appointment, the mechanic's German precision will find things wrong with your bike that you never even noticed. I once had a mechanic tell me that a scrape on my frame might compromise the structural integrity of the bike over time. At least I think he said something like that. It was all in German, He could have been giving me directions to the dry cleaners.

The other issue is of course that I don't always know what the bike mechanics are saying. I don't know all the words for bike parts in English, much less in German. And it's way harder over the phone. So when they call me up and start saying that they need to replace the umwerfschalterbremsekabelpedalenwerk in order for the bike to work properly, even though you could, probably, still ride it without replacing the umwerfschalterbremsekabelpedalenwerk (thats all the bike words I know in German squished into one, but it sounds believable, doesn't it?), I don't know what to do. Am I being upsold? No, not exactly. These guys are less interested in profits than in making your bike technically, mechanically precise to the last millimeter. They want to slap a Made in Germany label on it and send you to the Tour de France.

That's not a race I'm likely to enter because a) it's only for men, b) I'm not very fast, and c) my husband wouldn't come with me because he won't go to France (too many French people there). So in that case, it's probably okay not to replace the whatever it's called, slap some oil on the chain, rub it down with a rag and get on the road. Sorry, sweetheart, your spa days are over.