Category: personal

Been an interesting few weeks. On September 4, I went in for minor knee surgery – should have been a few days of discomfort and then a few weeks of steady recovery and I’d be back, better than ever… well, that was the idea. Don’t know what went wrong, but it involved lots of swelling and pain, and a couple of unscheduled nights in hospital. In the scheme of things it’s still pretty minor stuff – even though three weeks later, I’m still on crutches, I am slowly getting better and there shouldn’t be any permanent problems. What has been interesting though, is the stuff I’ve learned on the way.

1) You get helpless real fast! When things go wrong, they go wrong quickly. One minute you’re tracking OK and the next, you’re doped up with morphine, unable to move around independently and incapable of doing anything more than watch TV. Don’t ever imagine you won’t end up there: very confronting.

2) Life on crutches is hard! Every day you walk around town you’ll see people with mobility problems. There are people on crutches, with walking sticks, in wheelchairs. It’s commonplace – so much so that I know I take it for granted that they’re doing OK, sure it’s inconvenient, but it can be done. That was until I tried to get off a tram for the first time the other day. It is a long way down when you’ve got a bung leg and only a pair of crutches to stop you! Around about then I began to appreciate just how terrifying it must be for all those people, particularly the older ones, who don’t have the greatest balance or have some other problem. Trams, stairs, crossing busy roads, doors that want to squash you, even just an uneven footpath – all these things present incredible obstacles that I never have given a thought to in my daily life. So next time you see someone with a walking stick, just make sure they don’t need a hand with anything. It might be a minute’s inconvenience for you, but nothing like what they face every minute of every day.

3) Accessibility matters. I was once surprised during a conversation with an architect who was bemoaning the cost of complying with disabled access regulations. Coming from a web development background I was familiar with the extra care that was required to ensure compliance with disability legislation. It’s much the same in concrete as it is in html… it takes a little more time, but the benefits are for all. Now that I’ve been on the other side of this, temporarily disabled, and I’ve seen just how daunting it can be when an environment is not well designed. What makes my blood boil though, is that there are still plenty of people (in my organisation and elsewhere), who commission, manage and build websites that don’t comply with accessibility legislation. The arrogance is breathtaking: as if it isn’t hard enough just getting by day to day with a disability, there are people out there who think it isn’t worth the effort to make life for these people just a little easier. I’m just going to have to take a bit more of a mongrel attitude with me when I return to work!

‘scuse the awful pun, but the other day, I was alerted (by treadly) to the fact that Aldi had an upcoming sale which included some cycling gear. I am a keen commuter cyclist – that is, I cycle to work – on the weekends, I do occasionally do a bit of urban cruising, but I am not a ‘serious’ cyclist in the lycra sense. The Aldi catalogue displayed a number of items which promised to make my cycling warmer and drier, so at 8:50am I was waiting outside the store with a dozen or so others to try and grab my bargain.

Take note of that – a dozen or so others – this was no ‘door buster’ crowd. Brunswick folk don’t go in for that stuff anyway and judging by the body language I wasn’t the only one for whom this was a novel experience. The doors opened and there was no rush or rudeness, just an orderly stroll to the aisle with the goods. Unfortunately, that was where the rudeness began…

I’m not familiar with this type of thing, but a couple who obviously were, had pushed their trolley on an angle into the short, narrow aisle – deliberately blocking access to others from one end, while they occupied the other end and simply grabbed armfuls of garments and loaded them into the trolley. Frustratingly, they didn’t seem that interested in the rack of garments I was after, but they blocked me out nonetheless. I was able to get what I wanted by reaching through the rack from the other side of the shelving, but plenty of other folk were frustrated.

Anyway – I got a few things – about $30 worth. They all seem to be quite good quality, each one of them would normally cost more than $30 alone, so I can’t complain about the value.

As I was walking out I passed the couple with the trolley – they’d finally finished their ‘frenzy’ and were taking stock. One said to the other: “What are these?”, to which the other replied “I dunno – you put them in!”. Yep, that’s right, they didn’t even know what they were getting off the racks! – all they were interested in was stacking as much into the trolley as they could – they were now picking over it to decide whether they really wanted it… just amazing. Not that there is any law against it – you might take a couple of sizes of trousers to the fitting rooms, just to make sure you get the one you want – these people were simply taking that process to it’s extreme.

No point lowering myself to their level and getting pushy about it, but maybe, if there’s a next time, and I find myself blocked by these two shopping guerillas… I might just pull out the phone and take a video, so you can all enjoy the fun!

Three flat tyres in the last month! You start to curse people who leave broken glass on the road. Since I started spending a bit more on my tyres, the problem has almost vanished – in fact, apart from the most recent three, I think I’ve only had two others in the past year, so it’s really not a major problem.

However, am I blaming the wrong people? I don’t keep records of this stuff, but at least three of my punctures in 2008 were not due to something sharp, but were the seams of the tube splitting. The last one was particularly annoying – an otherwise pristine BBB tube – only a few months old. I’m a bit more forgiving when a well patched old warrior gives way at the stitching, but this one had no excuses.

I don’t pump my tyres ridiculously hard or do anything else that might aggravate the problem – Is it just me, or are others finding the quality of tubes becoming an issue?

It’s war out there, you know! This morning, as I rode my trusty treadly to work, I copped a bit of verbal abuse. Nothing terribly unusual about that, when the traffic is bad – bad things happen. This time it was different though, I was copping it from another cyclist.

I’ll step back a moment. I ride a pushie, I occasionally ride a motorbike, and very occasionally I drive a car. I often see dickheads driving cars and trucks, I sometimes see dickheads riding motorbikes, and I occasionally see dickheads riding pushbikes. If I was honest, I’d say the proportions are roughly the same.

The three serious accidents I’ve personally seen this year involving a pushbike were caused by… another pushbike! Two were caused by a pushbike rider crossing a stationery column of car traffic, but failing to look for bikes in the cycle lane. The third was caused by a cyclist coasting through a red pedestrian light – only to slam into a cyclist walking their bike across the crossing. Stupid, stupid stuff. Incidentally, all three of these happened on Royal Parade near Melbourne Uni.

Anyway, forward to today. It’s a bit of a bunfight along Royal Parade – there are always fast and slow cyclists – occasionally cars trying to turn or park – I find a little bit of patience goes a long way. There is one cyclist, however, who is riding pretty hard – at one stage, he got in the way of a car taking off from a traffic light – wobbling all over the place and using the car’s lane – technically illegal, but we all know the law is an ass. So, that was one pissed off driver. Funnily though, through all his puffing and pushing, I was still ahead of him as we approached Grattan Street, where the lights had just gone red. Ahead of me was a van in the right lane, indicator on, trying to get across to the left lane, so I slowed to let him across. He was uncertain, so in the end I almost stopped before he crossed. He was nothing but curteous, he did no wrong, he was in a tricky spot and I let him go.

Anyway, I coast to the red light, when this guy pulls up beside me and says ‘never give them an inch’. To which I replied, that I wouldn’t be taking his advice, because I didn’t think much of the way he rode. This seemed to upset him a little – he said I’d nearly caused him to run into the back of me (remember, we’re in a narrow lane about 30 metres from a red light here – what is the point in going fast?), but when I pointed out that in anyone’s eyes, that would have been his fault, he shut up. Anyway, as I said to him. I’ve been commuting by bike for 25 years (actually, it’s 28… getting old!) and I’ve had plenty of opportunity to decide the way I’ll ride.

In recent years, my attitude has softened a little and I’ve taken pains to ride within the law as much as possible (on both motorbike and pushbike), even when the law seems stupid. I’ve also been more patient and forgiving to other road users – even when they do stupid things.

At first, I adopted this strategy simply to gain the high moral ground… I figured, I couldn’t get cranky with drivers breaking the law and doing stupid things, if I turned around and did the same. What actually happened was that I stopped copping abuse, I started getting waves and smiles instead of fingers and scowls. Sure, drivers still do dumb things, I still get cranky with them, but I’m a commuter, not some sort of policeman. I let them have it at the time, but I don’t take it on myself to teach them some manners. End result, I enjoy my cycling more… well, except for today, when a feral biker gave me some lip!