I don’t know if anyone out there has ever experienced this but I got a big surprise this week when I dropped my bike off at the shop. I’ve had my current bike for seven years and I have taken very good care of the clutch; I’ve spent myriad hours at the track, I’ve ridden the same twisty mountain road so many times I could navigate it with my eyes closed and I’ve blasted countless miles of straight and flat freeway. 35,000 miles and still the clutch is in great shape…or so I thought.
Then, just a day or so ago, a day straight out of my nightmares I find my self in the middle of a semi-busy intersection and I can’t seem to get my clutch to work.
“What the heck?!” I’m thinking. “Everything was just fine yesterday.” My noble steed gets towed to my service center of choice and things get worse when I find out that I have to wait at least a day before I’ll even know what the issue is or how much it’s going to cost to resolve it.
The suspense kills. I could only compare it to getting suspended from a job I love and having to wait a couple days for my boss to call and tell me what my future with the company is going to be. In other words, anxiety over a phone call from my mechanic was not the worst feeling I could have experienced but it certainly wasn’t near the best.
To shorten an otherwise lengthy story, I get the call and I find out that it’s not the clutch ( I didn’t think so: I’m a clutch master). Instead, the clutch push rod is the problem and the estimated repair bill…NOT THAT BAD! I expected far worse. I’m confident that the same repair for a car from the same year would have been more costly, though I don’t know for sure.
So the surprise was a pleasant one. Maybe I’m just naïve because this is the first major repair I’ve had to pay for, but if that’s the case then I must say that ignorance is bliss.
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