By James Durand
I’ll go in reverse since I like to finish on a positive theme most of the time.
The Ugly:
A few weeks ago a fellow dropped into the store to borrow a tool for a quick repair on his junker bike. Jon helped him out and he was about to go on his way when another customer noticed that this was his bike being worked on. It had been stolen a few months back.
When the fellow was confronted, he remained calm, but it was definitely not pleasant and could have run amok quickly. The original owner wasn’t that concerned about the stolen bike since it was well past its best before date and he felt the confrontation was not worth the hassle.
It ended quickly and somewhat calmly, but was still frustrating to see the theft left as is.
The Bad:
Last week just before my Thursday night ride, I was loading up bikes and organizing our route, when another fellow popped in (different guy from our first fellow).
This guy was looking for a used bike and clearly was not having a great day. I had a bike we had just tuned up and readied for sale. It was priced at $200, but this guy only had $100.
Partly because I wanted to help him out, and partly because I was now late for my ride, I took the $100 and thought I’d made him happy. Then he got a bit upset and told me I should give him a free helmet and gloves because he’d just bought a bike.
I didn’t have a calculator handy, but it seemed that selling a bike for $100, and then giving away another $150 worth of gear, was bad math. I said no.
So, this guy yelled some profanity in my direction and stormed off with his new bike, apparently not as happy as I’d hoped.
I used his $100 to buy beer and pizza for the crew. Lemons into lemonade right?
The Good:
Good is an understatement on this one, GREAT might start to describe it.
Swicked started a campaign recently to raise money for the Bike Park. We’re hoping to raise the much needed $10,000 to complete the park this summer.
We set a timeline of six weeks to raise the funds and Swicked is matching donations up to $4000.
I honestly didn’t know how it would go over, but hoped our matching donations, and our enthusiasm for this project, would encourage the community to kick in.
On day two, my friend Allan Edie dropped in with a cheque for $1000, the next day we received another donation of $1000 from the Buller family. Shortly after that another $650 donation from Ryan at Rad Media, and a bunch of donations kept coming for several hundred dollars each. Within a few days we were almost at the goal. Then our old neighbour Wes came in and decided he would finish off the challenge, and wrote a fat cheque.
Bam, in less than two weeks we exceeded the goal and now have over $10K for the completion of the bike park.
This community never ceases to amaze me with its generosity.
Not only do I want to thank everyone for their donations and support, but more so, for reminding me that good deeds quickly erase the affects of The Bad, and The Ugly.
I’m James Durand and I’m Goin’ Ridin’