{"id":108,"date":"2006-07-26T02:03:45","date_gmt":"2006-07-26T09:03:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/?p=108"},"modified":"2006-07-26T02:03:45","modified_gmt":"2006-07-26T09:03:45","slug":"all-is-fair-in-love-and-biking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/2006\/07\/all-is-fair-in-love-and-biking\/","title":{"rendered":"All is fair in love and biking…"},"content":{"rendered":"

Speaking of ecologies of service, I bought a bike a week and a bit ago. Not an easy task in a city that’s just swarming with them, they’re usually overpriced and demand is high, and so for the few weeks that I have in this lovely city, I didn’t want to invest 200 euros. I went online to a aggravatingly badly designed dutch<\/a> website and with the help of my friend Laura, bid on a woman’s bike that a woman was selling in the North of Amsterdam. Eventually she agreed to the low low price of 45 euros and I went to meet her. Took a bus at Centraal (to be pronounced as if you had a potato stuck in your mouth with a long hiss for the s and a long drawn a) and 30 minutes later, in a weird look-alike of american-suburbia in Amsterdam- Noord, I waited at the bus stop for Rebecca, the bike owner. Turns out the bike had a flat tire and so, i grumbled a tad but remembered seeing bike pumps at my flat and after having convinced a bus driver to take me back even if it was against the “rules”, I walked my bike home happily.<\/p>\n

Flash forward to back home where the bike pumps end up not working as befitting more elegantly a mountain bike rather than my city bike. I remember that there are 2 bike shops by my place and decide to go there to get the tires pumped. These little stores have, however a very north american schedule of 10-6, which also correspond to my work hours. Flash forward a week, I wake up on Saturday morning, decided to deal with this “issue” and get a the tire fixed once and for all, I step out my door, and freeze. Nothing. My precious bike with an already rich history was stolen! As i turned to my local friends here and cry out in outrage, they just shrug their shoulders and go “yeh a week is too long, it’s bound to get cleaned off”… what! There has to be a service solution somewhere in there… a 24h bike store anyone? a dropoff anytime\/repair\/get it back the next day service? a call this number and we’ll deal with the problem 24h? RFID on each bike to locate it back? If North America has the CAA<\/a> for example, what’s the equivalent here?<\/p>\n

Yes, I’m just bitter and miss my bike… god only knows what happened to my precious Tulipa<\/a> bike that I left in Milan. Sigh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Speaking of ecologies of service, I bought a bike a week and a bit ago. Not an easy task in a city that’s just swarming with them, they’re usually overpriced and demand is high, and so for the few weeks that I have in this lovely city, I didn’t want to invest 200 euros. I… Continue reading All is fair in love and biking…<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[49,52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rants","category-service-design","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p41XhY-1K","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/108\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.designswarm.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}