In which our Heroine discovers that her bicycle is rotten to the core

I went to the bicycle collective again yesterday, hoping to fix a stiffness in my bike's joints that made the handlebars very difficult to turn. The problem had developed quite suddenly this week, and I imagined it should be easy enough to fix -- perhaps a bit of grease in the steering mechanism, and then voila! As I wheeled my bike over, I was daydreaming peacefully about how I'd spend the rest of my afternoon.

Alas, crippling rust was discovered in hidden places; fixing the joint turned out to require the total replacement of a small but crucial metal cylinder deep inside my bike's front bar and of two ball-bearing mechanisms, and took three painstaking hours. The bicycle mechanic supervising was the same patient, rather taciturn little man as last time. I'm quite proud of the mess my bike must have been in for the repair to cause him such apparent enjoyment. At any rate, on at least three occasions he made the cheerful discovery that the problem wasn't what he'd thought, but actually something considerably subtler.

His instructions were half in German, half in broken English. I was pleased to find that the mathematical German vocabulary I've been acquiring lately is helpful for bicycle mechanics: such phrases as "straight" and "separating" and "hold fixed" carry over directly. The optimistic meaning of "relatively easily" is also a common feature.