Run over, busted and broken

 

I bike commute every day, usually into a head wind on the way to work. Monday it was cold, but there was no wind at all. Amazing. So I got excited and rode hard — apparently so hard that when I crossed Lone Tree Way I popped my pannier right off my bike. Who knows, maybe I didn't have it attached as securely as it should have been. To make matters worse, I was working hard enough I didn't even notice it was gone until I got to work. I made a very fast ride back, praying I'd see it.

I didn't.

But within a minute of getting home, my phone rang. A very nice woman told be she'd seen my bag in the road, and saw "tweekers" making a move on it. She actually stopped her car and chased them off. Those bad guys were going through my wallet, and got all my cash, but the good neighbor recovered it and saved all my credit cards and drivers license. She also saved my very pricy Oakley Jawbone prescription sunglasses and a backup bike jersey. Alas, she told me, the laptop had been run over. Then, as if tracking me down after recovering my stuff wasn't enough, she drove it over to my house and handed it to me.

I tried pulling out the hard drive and putting it in an external case, and it almost worked. I managed to get some important things off it, but all my mail — some which is important — is gone. I guess having a hard drive run over isn't very good for data integrity.  At least I have a backup, but it isn't as recent as I'd like. Fortunately I keep my gradebook on Dropbox, so I still have a record of my students' grades.

My pannier is pretty well destroyed as well, so I'll also need to replace it.

At times like this Tricia likes to point out "it's only stuff" and I guess she's right. I'm rather traumatized about losing so much email, and all the replacement expenses, but I'm not bleeding or broken myself, and my faith in humanity got a nice boost, so all in all, life is still good.

I just hope I don't have any bicycle expenses for a while...