no, really, just try stealing these bikes
As a vaguely-related followup to my post about people "stealing" the chocolate I keep on my desk for people to take ( here), a story:
After Burning Man 2008, we planned to drop our bikes off at the roadside bike stand where we had purchased them. The person who runs this business takes bikes at the end of each festival, stores them, does a modicum of upkeep on them, and sells them to Burners at the beginning of the next year's event for $40. This is a genius business plan as long as space is cheap. It works well for burners, who effectively rent a bike for $40 for 3-10 days, and for the businessperson, who doesn't really have to do much except deal with a fuckload of bikes, which, I'll grant, is probably a pretty big job.
Anyway, we had picked up a bunch of these bikes on our way in, and planned to drop them off as we left, but the sign at the dropoff point said, "NO MORE BIKES!"
WHAT?? What were we going to do with 5 dusty crappy bikes? We certainly didn't want to fly them back to Boston.
Then someone had the brilliant idea to post them on Craigslist as giveaways in Las Vegas once we arrived. Perfect!
So, we got to our hotel, unloaded the bikes from the RV, parked them in a prominent spot in the parking lot, and posted to CL. Then, after hours of dusty RV cleaning, a bunch of transcendent showers, and dinner, we went to sleep. In the morning, the bikes were gone! Hooray!
I got back to Boston and told this story to one of my colleagues, who said in horror, "But how do you know the bikes weren't stolen??"
After Burning Man 2008, we planned to drop our bikes off at the roadside bike stand where we had purchased them. The person who runs this business takes bikes at the end of each festival, stores them, does a modicum of upkeep on them, and sells them to Burners at the beginning of the next year's event for $40. This is a genius business plan as long as space is cheap. It works well for burners, who effectively rent a bike for $40 for 3-10 days, and for the businessperson, who doesn't really have to do much except deal with a fuckload of bikes, which, I'll grant, is probably a pretty big job.
Anyway, we had picked up a bunch of these bikes on our way in, and planned to drop them off as we left, but the sign at the dropoff point said, "NO MORE BIKES!"
WHAT?? What were we going to do with 5 dusty crappy bikes? We certainly didn't want to fly them back to Boston.
Then someone had the brilliant idea to post them on Craigslist as giveaways in Las Vegas once we arrived. Perfect!
So, we got to our hotel, unloaded the bikes from the RV, parked them in a prominent spot in the parking lot, and posted to CL. Then, after hours of dusty RV cleaning, a bunch of transcendent showers, and dinner, we went to sleep. In the morning, the bikes were gone! Hooray!
I got back to Boston and told this story to one of my colleagues, who said in horror, "But how do you know the bikes weren't stolen??"