Crime and Motivation

We elect politicians, who make laws and hire police to enforce them.

What is the motivation of the police, aside from a paycheck, to actually prevent crime? Sure, they can show up after the fact, clean up, take notes, and track the perpetrators. But by then there are victims and survivors and witnesses who all find their lives changed or ended and their attitudes toward the police diminished. Well, at least, that's what I've observed.

So what will it take to change the culture of the police. They are part of our community but we often view them as the last resort or kind of a buffer from those who would harm us. Moreover, they are a different class of citizen. We have high expectations of them but offer them relatively low pay and poor working conditions.

My first idea is to re-integrate the police into the whole community. In New Orleans, there are about 300,000 residents and close to 2,000 N.O.P.D. officers. That's one for every 1,500 residents. If we could streamline the amount of time they need to write reports through technology and other automation and move them from within cars to a more interactive role, then more of us would know more of them. Waiting until the crime has occurred is too late to build a trust bond between resident and officer of the law. Having a previous relationship is key in law enforcement. How many of us hesitate to involve police for not wanting to get involved and just hoping the prblem will go away. Having police officers that you trust with information that can save a life or protect property and prevent crime is a great resource for both the individual and our city.

Less laws, more enforcement of current laws, less division between police and residents, more individual involvement in reporting and witnessing and above all a District Attorney's office who will prosecute offenders instead of demoralizing police and communities by releasing criminals without trial. Make reporting easier for police, provide bonuses and pay increases for performance, and allow and require them to get to know the people they serve and protect.

Making time biscuits

I was burnt. Reduced to reacting and sloppy work habits, I took the week off. I must say I miss work a bit. The customers with their endless lists of problems to solve and the occasional educational challenge from the educationally challenged. With a wee bit of reflection and an overwhelming sense of re-dedication, I will be spending the next three days being free, playing with the dog, and cooking good food.

Think?

I don't know why I slip away from Zen from time to time. I'm leaving the shop the other day and see a bar patron outside of the bar, on the cell, and with her drink glass on my truck. To elicit a response, I say, "Get your drink off my bar". She exits her call, turns, and becomes defensive. No sense of humor. I'm met with lots of, "Do you think I'm...". Oh, you want to know what I think. I think you wouldn't be amused if I showed up with my drink on your car. I think you have no respect for anything in the area, like everything around her is part of some alcohol playground. I think you're only here to be able to say where you are to people on the cell who aren't here. I think... crap... I say, "I think you're a pretentious bitch. I think you don't care and should go back to drinking". Not very nice and absent Zen.
LCDTV took a header biking out in Baton Rouge. Blown up wrist and cracked helmet and many impact abrasions. Man down! Warrior is out for a week starting a day before I get back from my second break of the year. I doubt I'll take anymore strings of days off until Winter. Phantom has his helmet cam back in action. I like the videos, very realistic. Red dog got a new collar.
Today a client comes in with her 50 lb. trike loaded down with 60+ lbs. of art type stuff. She has a flat and before exploring common occurrences like punctures, she is convinced that we installed the wrong size tube the last time we changed her tube. There is no vocal reply that would be effective, this is only resolved though demonstration. Funny when I show her the little piece of wire poking through the tire. No slight of hand, and a guarantee that she will be charged if we're not at fault, she is cornered and ought to pay extra for the immediate service. I feel that the flat occurred during a period which within some grace from the original repair and charge her only for the tube. If I had been thinking, I would have weighed the option for ending commerce with this person and saving future drama as is likely to happen with this client. Command performances with great explanation are tiring and unprofitable. The catch-22 of doing business in NOLA. xx% of the people here are poor. You can choose to price them out of your store or slide your scale to provide them with help they really could use. The downside is they open cans of worms on you and return too frequently and take time you could spend on people with money. If only those of little means could have little expectations or maybe some patience? I try to respect everyone as individuals. Reality is different in a business. Most clients are appreciative and respectful. It's hard not to toss out the fringe clients when they abandon their bikes, steal your time without ever intending to buy something, and otherwise assume we're the reason their bikes don't work or that we're rich. I think that everyone is prejudiced about everyone else and in some way, play out their position regardless of reality. Well almost everyone. I guess this is my prejudice. It's just a supposition.

My dear Wednesday,

If has been over seven years now that we generally close on Wednesdays. Only the front door is closed most of the day. It has been a day of cleaning, stocking, special projects, mountain biking, and a respite from the never ending calls of customer duty. I'm not sure how we ran the store 7 days a week for so long. It was a long time ago. I'm off to see her now.

The Victims

We get some characters. One guy FG, smelled like urine on the stove and was checking out a bag, saying, "I know what some of these pockets are for, but this is must be where you put your crack pipe". I agreed with him. There is a group who MO is to spend your time asking baited questions until you either lose time with no sale or ignore them or kick them out. One guy pulled the infinite questions while on his cell phone and due to his odor was overheard saying, "I can't believe this guy is spraying me with lysol", to the person he was on the phone with as I am kicking him out.
Our typical customer varies from the "INNERTUBE!" guy, that's his greeting, to those pulling out bikes from the past to find out how close to the price of a replacement bicycle a full repair cost will get. Others are browsing for a gift, the second most popular purchase is a lock. Rental customers have many categories. Follow this - Go to a different city, walk in to a bike shop, ask to rent a bike, and then ask them if there are any nice places to ride around here. Kind of like renting a car and asking if there are any nice places to drive or going to a pharmacy, buy some condoms and asking the cashier if they know of anyone who might like to have sex. My favorite customers are trained that we won't wantonly take advantage of them and generally trust us to spend their money wisely. I don't mind skepticism, but negativity and cynicism get old really quickly.
So who are the victims. Well some victims come in and want as much as they can get for nothing. Others want a realy nice, light, fast bike that costs less than $300. Wow, me too. The best victims are the ones with a bike that's on life support who want some minor repair affected and it can't be performed without some liability issue. Catch-22. No work, no money, or lots of work, still bad bike, still no money. The lesser experienced are sometimes taken in by what seems like an easy job. If we could screen out those with less than $10 on them when thay came in... You don't have to buy anything, just have the $10.
More than 85% of our customers are fun, freindly people who know how business works and easily do commerce. But it sometimes seems that 85% of our time is spent on the 15% pain in the butt, no money having, stinky bums and otherwise uncivilized children and adult children.
A few of them can be fun and I even like some of them. I always hope that one day, they'll wake up and begin contributing something to the community, like commerce or polite behavior.

Back to the front

It's easy to lose track of what's important when you're tired. We have a special kind of bicycle shop. We want the clientèle to believe in us and trust our advice. We go to great lengths to choose products we feel are high quality and great value. Well, most of the products at least. We extensively assemble each bicycle from the least expensive to the full custom, top of the line, dream machines. We often do a little lagniappe on the bikes we take in for repair. You know, something extra at no charge. You wouldn't get it if you asked for it, but extra love for good customers and those we would like to impress as well as a few just plain charitable acts for someone down on their luck are the norm. It's not something written into our corporate charter, but a natural offering in the spirit of generosity.
It has become more difficult to be generous lately as time constraints often has us tearing through repairs and moving along sales. As the staff diminishes, I think we will retract some of our instantaneous promises and look to provide a stable line of jobs that we can do our best on. Each bike presents a unique set of problems that keep you from truly knowing how long the repair will take. Especially if you aren't going to do the work.
It would be nice to divide the day into segments where from x:xx to y:yy we do this and so forth. Cleaning, repairs, organization, and more cleaning. It never works out the way I plan it no matter how hard I try. So, my goal will be starting from the front, where the money walks in, returning to the attitudes which make the shop a great place to shop and get your bike worked on.

Future Noir

It's seems like everyone is dizzy with the price of petrol. Gas passes the lips regularly in our daily discussions. Reality of cheap fuel has left us for the moment and panic rushes into our patriotically vacant souls. The price of anything that must be moved long distances or involves petroleum in its manufacture is going up. Period. Once offsets in wages catch up, another price hike will have already hit, leaving those without wage increases with even less. Fuel and the time to burn it increase in cost and those who make a buck speculating take that buck, we're in for an inflation ride for a good while. Even if politics turns your head, you're affected. The robber barons are back with a vengeance. 2009 has already seen the biggest price spike in memory and we're not even there yet. The global economy has us tethered to our creditors in a death grip and we so tangled, even if we eked back to our previous manufacturing glory, it wouldn't find a market.
So what now, a service oriented economy, with pharmaceuticals and education as our major exports? We'll teach you how to sell and use drugs, the right ones. Big thoughts for a lowly mechanic who's main goal is to be a homeowner before his untimely death by lack of health insurance and malpractice. What else is there but buying a space to slowly die in so when you can no longer work, at least you don't have to worry about rent while you're sitting in the dark. Maybe someone to share the misery, I mean, memories with. The future may be black, but so what. We need answers that solve the simple problems like radio spectrum allocation and honey bee colony collapse. Without solid science, we're blissfully ignorant. Pass the bliss when you're done with it.

There is no whip.

I am self motivating. I have a deep curiosity about the nature of things. Sometimes my hands hurt. These points are a general guide to my work ethic. I often say no first, and then do it anyway. I don't like feeling as if I'm being taken advantage of, but I like seeing the surprise of someone when they find something they wanted done - done. I don't know exactly what motivates others to perform, probably money or a sense of satisfaction. We all need money to pay for life. I want to do stuff I like to do, interesting stuff. Money is a bonus and it's taken me a long time to realize my worth in this department. I like finding ways to convince others that they want to do something or challenge themselves and their comfort level.
It is a challenge to me to both earn my keep as an employee and provide support for the staff. The Wizard shot an arrow at me today and I get the feeling he doesn't approve of some of my style of mechanics. He seeks an absolute solution and sees little room for shades of gray. I have very high standards of mechanics and aesthetics when I work an a bicycle. I don't like inelegant solutions, but I'm willing to arrive at a conclusion that my not be the best, but the better. Some work requires lowering standards to come to a cost effective completion. The gold dipped turd still stinks so save some money and don't shine shit. I've read repair tags that stated how many hours he spent on a bike and thought, "Was that necessary?".
We can all work smarter. As a simple start, we must strive to communicate with the clients and each other to make the most truthful, efficient path to the end goal. We can minimize mistakes and waste by not getting in over our heads and using the tremendous talent of the combined group to our advantage. There is no reason to be a soothsayer because being forthright and obvious will bring a better end. If someone doesn't like our honest suggestion, it is better we not serve them. It always comes back to bite us on the ass. On the other side, there is a natural progression we can follow to help the client arrive at a conclusion as we do. Being condescending doesn't work as well and being authoritative. Present the facts and don't be afraid to say, "I don't know".
I am not disappointed with the staff, quite the contrary. I am only disappointed that we are too busy to spend much time learning new things. It's not hard to learn to fix a bike, but it is hard to learn to fix all bicycles. The great thing about our demographic is the wide diversity of vehicles they provide to learn about. Our charge is actually service these bikes expertly. "To ask together" is at the heart of the word competition. By learning constancy, we have no competition.

The power of purpose

I love my boss. Otherwise my job would cease to be meaningful. He has a special place of business with some of the greatest people in the world as employees, friends, and clients. I work at a bicycle store. We service a great many cyclists in the New Orleans area. Stories abound of jobs where the pay is good but the toll on the soul leads to unhappiness. Not that I'm always happy, yet it is more often then not, our days are joyous and filled with humor.
I started working here about fifteen years ago. My employment history was mostly service oriented. I worked as a gardener, in a credit and catalog dept., as a busboy and bartender, and did some odd jobs for cash here and there. I am fiercely loyal and had been shopping at this store for 5 or 6 years before I approached them about work. The shop has had its struggles and schisms along the way and I think we've made it through the worst. Being nearly bankrupt in the mid 90's , we battled for over three years just to get back to even. Our best year ever was interrupted by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and still we returned to banner sales.
The philosophy is simple: treat people with genuine interest and serve them as guests in your home. We've all been to a business where we were ignored, pestered, or treated like crap. We don't want that to be how we are viewed and quite the opposite, we want our clients to feel our honesty and devotion to our craft. We make some of the finest bicycles in the world and are willing to fix just about anything. I goes to say that some folks will try to take advantage of the easy-going nature of the shop and we'll put up with it for a while. I won't pretend I've never asked someone to leave, met young children at door to explain why they're unwelcome without their parents, or spraying Lysol® on extremely unhygienic bums and gutter punks. What I will say is we're quite tolerant of the wide range of beliefs and practices of our customers and consider everyone's individual preferences when they pay us a visit.