Hunting The Muse

My bike was stolen.

My bike was stolen. argh!!!

And I feel really stupid now, and more than a little bit pissed off.

First, it was a nice bike. Not a completely gourmet bike, but a good $400 mountain bike. Second, I'm in a gated apartment community where you need a gate key to get in, and then need to use the gate key again to get into the storage area. Inside the storage area I had it locked to a bike rack with a u-lock and a cable.

And I have no idea when it was stolen. I hadn't been in there for a few months, since there wasn't any reason for me to go in there in the winter. I would check on it every once in a while, but that's about it. With the weather nice, I had been thinking about riding it some more, especially at my new place. This complex has always sort of bothered me, so I figured that it would be the first thing I'd take over to my new garage.

I'm pissed off at my apartment complex because they have been talking this place up as a luxury community and it sucks. I don't think they have any guarantees in the lease about the security of their storage facilities (why would they?). But, looking at the bike rack, I see there are *three* u-locks on the 12-slot rack that don't have bikes attached to them, including the rack where my bike was. So I'm wondering if they had other bikes being stolen recently that I didn't hear about - if so then I think I have something to argue about.

And the worst thing is that I got confused about registration. When I got a bike in Colorado and New York a long time ago, they had bike registration. When I bought the bike this time, I asked about registration and they looked at me funny, so I was all confused because I didn't see how to get identifying information about the bike. So today the police tell me that there's actually a serial number ON the bike, but I never wrote it down. :(

Update: Despite the manual telling me that the vendors wouldn't have it, I called my bike shop and they actually had the serial number on file. Yay them! So at least I haven't totally dropped any balls. That's cool they keep all that info on file - they are Paul's Bicycles of Eugene.

Got a haircut today. That helped me feel a bit better about myself. I still wish I had my bike though. :( Posted by Curt at May 18, 2002 04:17 PM