The Squeaky Wheel, and getting what you asked for

About three years ago, the local sewer folks, MSD (Metropolitain Sewer District) sent out a representative with a handful of maps and waiver forms. Seems that MSD was planning to rennovate the storm drains and sewer lines in my neighborhood, and they needed property owners to sign off in areas where excavation might enroach on private property.
As a sweetener, the guy said they would pave the gravel "right of way" that serves myself and three other residences as a driveway/alley.

So, we waited. Every few months, a truck full of surveyors would come out with their sighting instruments, and spray-paint little red lines on the ground, and plant little plastic flags all over. Then they would leave. The rain would wash away the spray paint, the kids would steal the little flags, and then in a few months they'd be out again to do the same thing.
I even sent an e-mail to the MSD offices, wondering when we might expect work to start.

Well, they did. About 6 weeks ago, MSD showed up with the world's largest back-hoe and proceeded to dig a huge hole in the street right in front of my house. They also suceeded in breaking the water line, which took a day to repair. The hole was left open for several days, then a couple of gravel trucks showed up and they filled most of it in, put steel plates over the top, erected "road closed" signs, and left.
Problem was, the hole was not completely closed; they left a large, gaping hole "protected" by orange plastic snow fence, dangling wires, and various bits of piping and other debris.
Not only unsightly, but hazardous as well. The plastic fencing rapidly collapsed, the wires dangled lower, and kids started using a mound of dirt as a bicycle jumping ramp.

This was status quo for nearly a month. I finally got tired of the situation, and envisioned some drunk from the nearby tavern plunging into the hole and suing ME because it was on my property.
I e-mailed MSD. No response.
I e-mailed my county councilman. Quick response, and he forwarded my note to his MSD liason.
However, a week passed and still no action.
I called the local TV news, and advised them of the situation. Still no response, but someone must have raised hell. Thursday, a crew arrived and re-did the snow fencing, raised the dangling wires, and generally cleaned up. Progress!
They also started excavating in earnest, and I now have a front yard entirely covered by 5 feet of dirt, more huge holes (surrounded by plastic fence) in the alleyway, and no chance of any more work being done till after the 4th.
Oh well....

Le Tour rocked by doping scandal

The day before the start of this year's Tour de France, the event, and the cycling world in general is rocked by a major doping scandal. As a result of an investigation in Spain, the names of more than 30 top cyclists, as well as athletes from other disciplines have been identified as customers of a physician dealing in banned substances such as growth hormone, EPO (a red-blood-cell booster) and storing blood for athletes for "blood doping".

As a result, several of the top names and contenders for the race this year have been booted from Le Tour, including Jan Ullrich, Eban Basso, Francisco Mancebo, and American Tyler Hamilton. There may be more casualties yet before tomorrow's Prologue, and the Tour may start with only 170 riders.

I find this all very sad. It's not as if professional cycling has not been plagued with such problems for many years; an old-time champion once quipped, "Le Tour is not won on mineral water."
One Tour back in the 70s was so bad it was dubbed "Le Tour de Pharmacie".

Still, with recent scandals, and the death by suicide of Italian champion Marco Pantani after he was kicked from the Giro D'Italia (The Italian equivalent of Le Tour), you'd have thought that there might be some effort to straighten things out.
Still, it's a professional sport, pursued in Europe with the same fanatacism (and money!) that Football and Baseball are in the states. There is a lot of money and prestige riding on Le Tour, and that brings in the motivation to succeed....

Campionissimo Lance Armstrong has been recently accused of doping prior to his Tour wins, right after he was diagnosed with cancer. Armstrong denies the allegation (made by the wife of an ex-teammate) and his physician has denied it as well, maintaining that Armstrong made no such statements.
Armstrong may be the most-tested athlete of all time, so if he was doping he was very, very clever about it. Personally, I believe his denials.

Le Tour is still a grand event, each year achieving the status of "most-watched" of all sporting events. It has always managed to rise above these scandals...Hopefully this will continue to be the case.

Customer Service

An observation:

For many years, various pundits have complained about the decine of "customer service" in general. Ill-informed, innatentive and rude sales people, unresponsive corporations, and so forth.

This eventually led to a sort of backlash, and many thousands of employees, managers, and even executives were exposed to the ideas of improving service. Even we police officers attended classes like "Service for Success", where we were encouraged to think of all of the people we dealth with (even criminals!) as "customers".

I can't say to what extent overall customer service has improved or not, but a couple of stories may illustrate what's good, and what still needs to be done:

First the good. All cyclists need a tire pump, usually more than one. I bought a Blackburn floor pump years ago, and after daily use for 5-6 years, the seal on the pressure guage failed. I e-mailed Blackburn to see if any parts were available, and found that this particular pump had been discontinued. Not to worry, however. They asked that I send them the pump to examine, and if it was a design failure, they'd send me a new one. It was, and they did. The new pump (a much nicer one) has been in use ever since.
I use it so much, in fact, that the little rubber inserts that grab the valve stem had become worn out. Another e-mail, and another case of "we don't make that model any more." Again, not to worry; they looked through their old parts and sent me the full rebuild kit, free of charge.
Blackburn is a subsidiary of Bell industries (Helmets and such), and all my contacts with the firm have been excellent.

Now the bad: We have our cable TV service through Charter Communications. We've used this for a long time; it's predecessor, Cencom, was the first cable service in the St. Louis area.
For the most part, service has been OK, though with constant rate increases.
However, recently I began having trouble with our second TV, the one in the computer room. Those annoying "this channel will be available shortly" screens began to show up, on increasingly more channels. This despite the fact that the same channel would be playing in the next room.
I suspected the digital reciever box.
From long experience with cable, I tried the "re-set" routine, that involves unplugging and letting the little chip reset itself. That didn't work.
So I called the service number. Used to be this was a local number with actual technicians you could talk to. Not anymore, it's a toll-free thing that connects you to the "automated" service. For those that have not experienced these abominations, they have have a human-sounding voice track and some sort of voice-recognition software. You are supposed to talk to the machine as if it were an actual person. I do not know anyone who finds these things to be anything but extremely annoying.
Nonetheless, I let the thing go on, and it tried to walk me through the same re-set routine I had just done. I answered all the questions "no", and eventually it decided I needed to talk to a technician. It tried to transfer the call, and I was disconnected.

My next avenue was to e-mail the service department. There's a link on the Charter website. So, I wrote up the problem, and fired it off. No reply. No automatic "we got your message" note.
I let it ride over the weekend, then sent another one. Same result, no reply or recognition. By this time, I am getting more than a bit cheesed off.
I tried the "online chat" feature, and was connected to a young lady who tried to walk me through the re-set procedure yet again. I explained that I had already done this several times.
"Are the connections tight?" she asked. I explained that they were untouched since the original installation. I checked 'em all anyway, finding everything tight. "Well, we need to send someone out then." No kidding...
So I make an apointment for the next Wednesday. I explianed to the girl that I was off on Mondy, Tuesday, and Wednesday. About an hour later, I got an automated phone call confirming my appointment for Thursday. The robot told me I'd be charged if no one was home.

I called back, bypassing the robot service to "wait in line" for a tech. I waited for 30 minutes. Finally got a young fellow who apologized for the mix-up, then explained the next apointment they'd have was two weeks later, and the technician might show up anytime between 8AM and 5PM. We'd be required to stay at home all day, waiting for his arrival.

After grudgingly accepting this, I sat down and wrote an actual snail-mail letter to the CEO of Charter, explaining much of the above, and pointing out in no uncertain terms that it was no wonder people were switching to sattelite and DSL.
That was last week, naturally I have recieved no reply.....

My Cilo

Here's the Belgian-made Cilo (pronounced "see-low" according to a French-speaking friend) that I've restored. I have been restoring and re-selling older bikes for some time, and this one is quite nice.
Originally meant as a utility roadster, it has a very nice Columbus lugged-steel frame, a bunch of Shimano 600 (equivalent to today's Ultegra group) bits, and some cheap features as well.
I did a lot of work on this one, not only re-doing wheels and bearings and cables, which I expected, but finding a few pieces that are always hard to obtain for older bikes.

At it's present state, it's a very comfortable ride, what with the nice springy steel frame and the cushy 28mm tires. I havn't decided if I'll keep it or not; it's not really a collector's item. Might be fun to do it up with all original-vintage Shimano parts, but that takes a lot of searching on eBay!

Starting Out

Thought I'd give this blog thing a try. I'm a 59-year old who's been in law enforcement since 1968, and in bicycling since the mid-70s. At present, I work in "campus" law enforcement, and do bike patrol for the department.
In addition, I'm kind of the department's "bike guy", responsible for maintenance, setup, fitting, and so forth for our fleet of 16 bicycles. Of course I have my own little fleet:




A 1981-vintage Miyata roadster (this is not a current pic, I've been refurbishing).

A home-built recumbent made up from several different bicycles, and a 1983-vintage Cilo (hehe-probably never heard of that, it's Belgian). (no pic as yet)

As you may well imagine, I'm an inveterate tinkerer and builder, and enjoy making and repairing things. I've also recently built a cigar-box guitar, for instance.


Bikes are hardly my whole life, of course, I have far more interests than I have time to adress properly. Thus, the "observant" part of my blog's title; I plan to include comments on all manner of things.