Tape woes and rescuing a motorbike

Work was a frustrating and stressful day. First was trying to work out why the belligerent backup system in work had taken a hate to two tapes that it decided that it didn't want anything to do with. As the main Unix and backup guy is on leave it was up to me to calm the tantrums and get it working. I managed to reconcile it with one tape and get it loaded into the library but the other one had to be looked out by the external support. The rest of the day was spent dashing around getting more and more demented.

As a result, I didn't feel like walking the dog when I got home and most of the evening was spent in one of those fugue states where I didn't do very much and didn't feel inspired to do anything. I played with the Monstrosity a bit, and decided that it works well enough to perhaps give it a better body and some proper electronics, and watched some videos on Youtube. It looked to be a slow evening.

But then Andy called. His housemate Steve had come off his bike in Denbigh. He was travelling up the industrial park when a car pulled out right in front of him. Fortunately he seems to be OK other than a bad leg. But the problem was that he'd been whisked off to hospital and his damaged bike was left at the side of the road where the police had left it. So it was up to Andy and I to get it back to Andy's house, by wheeling it along. Sounds easy?

Nope. For a start, motorbikes are heavier than they look. If this one, a nice Aprilia of some sort, had fallen over, it would have taken both of us to get it upright again. It was also stuck in gear, and the handlebar with the clutch on it was broken off. Not a good start. Somewhat embarassingly, we couldn't work out how to get the gearbox into neutral. So Steve called a mate of his who came along and got it into neutral after a bit of fuss, which let us finally get it moving. The first bit was downhill and we found that the front brake is rather aggressive when you're trundling it at about 3mph and it took several abrupt halts before we got used to using it to hold the thing back.

Of course, two guys trundling a nice looking bike along in the dusk gets quite a bit of attention. Boy racers in their farting Corsas jeered as they went past and one guy on a moped stopped to see what was going on. The journey took quite a while and some bits were quite awkward and there were occasional moments of panic when one of us thought the other was dropping it. It was also leaking some fluid, which didn't seem to be petrol. I somehow managed to run it over my foot on a couple of occasions too. One bit which felt dodgy was when we took it past the motorbike shop where it was actually bought and we got paranoid that it looked like we were nicking it.

After putting it safe in the garage, Andy gave me a lift back to where we'd picked up the bike and left my car, only to find a security guy examining it suspiciously. It turned out that a nearby place had recently had a robbery with people stealing diesel. When he saw my diesel AX parked outside a JCB storage place, he'd assumed the worst, and was very relieved when he found out the true story.