I have had this post planned for a while. It’s taken a number of different tones over the past 6 odd months, starting with Jubilation: “Yippee! My bike is back, and she looks better than ever!”. Then it moved on to “Finally! My Bike is back!”. Some relief and jubilation in the tone. Then it was “Well I eventually got my bike back, but at least she looks great!” Annoyed but happy.

At about 4 months in, I was planning a hate post for the guy that was repairing the damage to my bike: “The stupid bastard still has my bike! I can’t believe someone could offer such shoddy service!”. At 5 months I was in tears, would I ever get the damn bike back? I hated my formerly trusted mechanic for making such an idiot out of me.

Last Friday, at six and a half months, greenie came home. I thought I’d be elated, but the elation hasn’t come. Rueful relief is more like it.

What follows is a post of the tribulations and excuses that made this a six and a half month journey. Not great reading for you I am sure, but hopefully therapeutic for me.

At the end of April this year Hunny and I did a 4000 km trip from JHB down to Port Elizabeth, along the coast line to Cape Town and back. Hunny on his Suzuki M109R, me on my Kawasaki ZZR400. The little 400 coped extremely well with the long distance. Our average pace was probably between 130 – 140 km/h and she did just fine.

On day 6 of the journey I had a lapse in concentration at a crucial spot, hit some gravel and we came down. Not a scratch on me, but the greenie took a bit of a hit:

Good thing Hunny brought duct tape, we were able to stick her back together and carry on. The damage seemed to be only cosmetic, except for my right foot peg which he were are to get welded back on 400km’s later. No right foot peg made for some interesting riding and a couple of cramped muscles, but that’s another story.

We arrived back in Joburg on May 2nd, and that afternoon took the bike in to our trusty mechanic Norman to ask him what we should do. Norm agreed that the damage was repairable, no bent frames, just cosmetic. And that’s when the waiting started.

Norm doesn’t do the paint & repair work himself, he sends it out to another provider. This guy (don’t know his name) was supposed to come in and pick up everything paintable (we decided to give the greenie a complete respray) and give Norm a quote. Well, paint guy took his own good sweet time, and came back with a fairly expensive quote, so Norm asked another guy for a quote, but it was in the same ballpark, so we decided to go with guy one, because we knew he did a very good job. So we finally got a quote to submit to insurance, this was 6 weeks later …

It’s notable that at this point, when Hunny went round to nag Norm for the quote, they tried to start the bike, it wouldn’t start. Norm said he’d look into that.

Anyway, insurance approved the quote, so now things were supposed to start happening. My work colleagues and friends were already asking me on a weekly basis “So when you are you getting your bike back?”. Embarrassed to say we didn’t even have a quote yet, I explained that we know Norm takes a little longer, but he does a really great job. (Which he does, but at what cost? My sanity?)

Time went on, and I kept asking Hunny what was happening with the bike (He was dealing with Norm at this stage), but progress was slow. We had planned a bike trip on the long weekend starting 9th August, and Norm had promised to get the bike back to us by the end of July. July came and went, and so did the long weekend, with only excuses from Norman. He had the paintwork back by this stage, but had done nothing at all with the bike in the meantime, and the bike still didn’t start!

At this point I’m feeling like the biggest idiot. It seems there is nothing we can do to get Norman to do his job, and because the insurance quote was approved for him to do the work, we couldn’t take it away from him without additional expenses. We know that he does do a brilliant job, and I was convinced that the result will be worth the wait. By this time I had asked my work colleagues not to ask about the bike anymore.

My birthday was on the 14 of August. When we didn’t get the bike back in time for the long weekend, I told Hunny that if it wasn’t back in the garage by my birthday, I’d call the 30 odd guests that were coming around for my birthday bash and tell them not to come. It was an empty threat, but Hunny did go to Norm and tell him that was my birthday, and Norm promised to (his own words) “pull finger” to get the bike back to me on my birthday. Birthday came and went, as did party, with no bike.

Somewhere around about here I decided to give Norm a call myself, just so he could lie to me also. He made some empty promises, weak excuses, and basically told me he was doing me a favor, and losing money, to salvage the bike because it should really have been a write-off. I told him that if it were written off I would have a new one by now. It was a cheap second hand bike when we bought it, so the quote to repair was ominously close to write-off value. In hind sight that would have been the wiser option, but it seemed silly to write off a bike for cosmetic damage.

And then the wait continued… Hunny was visiting Norm on a weekly basis to get the latest collection of excuses, and we were both feeling incredibly despondent about the bike. I started worrying that the insurance would refuse to pay the claim because too much time had elapsed. Hunny had Norm phone the insurance company. He fed them some story about waiting for parts and got their agreement to still pay once the claim was submitted.

At this point it was the non-starting of the bike, discovered before we got the quote, that was holding up matters. Norm suspected it was a compression issue, but just wasn’t getting around to doing anything with it. Hunny had a huge blow-out with Norm about that, and Norm assured him that he’d get to it within the week. Hunny thought they had reached an understanding. When he went around a week later to find that absolutely nothing had been done, he lost his cool. He went around the next day to fetch the bike (minus fairing etc) to take it to another shop so someone would at least look at it.

Randburg motorcycles got back to us within a week, having diagnosed some problem (I forget what…) and fixed it, and said that while there was a compression issue, it wasn’t too major and was likely long standing, we’d probably bought the bike that. They’re probably correct as twice while riding the bike I’d had a lack of power on pull-away, but that was twice in 6 months, so not a big deal.

Sadly the bike now had to go back to Norm to be fitted with fairing & etc, because he still had those parts. This was around mid October. Norman did get around to putting the bike together (minus the new exhaust) and we were getting hopeful that the end may be in sight. Norm then took the bike for a ride (its first in 6 months) and said that there was still something wrong with the engine, but he’ll take a look at it. Surprise surprise, a week later he’d still done nothing. In that time I’d been to visit him because I thought it only fitting that he lie to my face also, but Hunny had had enough. He went around that afternoon, came to an agreement with Norm that he’d take what the insurance gave him, we’d take the bike and the still not fitted exhaust, and we’d call it quits.

So the next week the bike was back at Randburg motorcycles, with my new favorite mechanic, Danie. The last time the bike had been with him it was missing some major parts that would have allowed him to test drive the bike, so he was quite apologetic that we had to bring it back. He explained that he was very busy at the moment, but would get back to us in a week, and amazingly he did! Wow! He thinks the bike it much better, but not 100%. It needs some new parts for the carburetors which will need to be imported from Japan at 6 -8 weeks delivery time, but we can take it home in the meantime.

Sourcing parts is the major problem with buying grey imports, we have learnt our lesson. We can also get a set of second hand carbs from bikeshop-online, they have 11 sets, and if the one we take isn’t hundreds, we can swap out through all 11 sets. It’s a tough call.

So end status is that yesterday Hunny rode by bike home from Randburg motorcycles (I haven’t ridden in so long I have probably forgotten how!) and it’s now in our garage with a stunning paint job, a carburetor problem and without its new exhaust. We still need to collect the new exhaust from Norman and get it fitted elsewhere.

If you are still reading, I think you can understand why my enthusiasm for getting my bike back is not what it should be. But she looks pretty, here are some before & after pictures.

Full view …

Part of the screen snapped off entirely, but duct tape is amazing stuff. This held together for the remaining 1 000 odd kilometers.

The missing piece of fairing from below the indicator is still somewhere outside Wellington. Paint guy did a great job of fixing that …

Lucy hates disappointments. Well obviously no-one likes disappointments, but Lucy seems to hate them more than most. When she was 18 Lucy decided not to hope for anything anymore. Hope too often leads to disappointments you see. If you start hoping that something will come true, you can start imagining that it will. And once Lucy has imagined something coming true it really knocks the wind out of her sails if it falls through.

Lucy admits she is probably a control freak. At work she struggles to delegate tasks, especially if the ultimate responsibility is hers. It’s not that she doesn’t think anyone else can do a better job that she can, she knows plenty of people who are more skilled in her line of work than she is, but most of them don’t share her sense of responsibility towards her projects. If Lucy turns in something that’s late or faulty she feels like she has let her clients down. Lucy hates to let people down.

Even in her personal life Lucy hates to rely on other people. Enough disappointments taught her that something that is important to her is not always a high priority on other peoples lists. And not everyone else hates to disappoint as much as Lucy does. Whenever possible Lucy will do everything she can herself. She will ask the help of a select few, but only people she knows are aware of how much she dislikes being disappointed. If Lucy asks you to bring a potato salad to the braai and you rock up with coleslaw Lucy will be sad. Her plan was for you to bring potato salad, she’s not angry with you, Lucy just likes things to go according to plan.

Lucy makes her plans carefully. When Lucy spoke to her manager in February about a change in career path, and Lucy’s manager told her that July was probably too soon, December was better, Lucy started making plans. Not cast in stone plans, but plans none the less. Lucy started to put a little hope in those plans, she had no reason to believe her manager would lie to her.

Today Lucy’s manager’s second-in-charge started talking about next year July. Lucy is sad. Sad and more than a little disappointed. To Lucy, her manager (through her second-in-charge) just lost credibility. She said December, now she’s saying July. How can Lucy believe that July will happen if December wont? Lucy needs a new plan, one that does not rely on her manager.

Apparently you can.

I first noticed my left eye didn’t see as well as my right in high school. Std 8 Science, copying down transparencies from the back row. It didn’t bother me much, and it was several years later before I decided to do something about it and get some glasses. I enjoyed having glasses at first. But the more I used them and the more dependant I became on them, the less I liked the idea that I’d be doing so for the rest of my life.

I am short sighted with mild astigmatism in my left eye. Or so I thought. A few years back I began contemplating LASIK surgery. It was out of my reach financially at that time, but I thought I’d get it done one day …

A few months back when my Hubby & I were discussing finances he suggested that it was about time I found out if I was a suitable candidate, and I duly made a booking (more than a month in advance) for this morning. I tried ever so hard not to get my hopes up, but so many of my friends had told me what great successes their operations were and how happy they were that they’d had it done. I found myself imagining what it would be like to read the DTSV blurb from the couch without my glasses and other small things.

This morning I discovered that my corneas are too thin for LASIK  surgery, and worse. I don’t have a mild astigmatism, I have this. Sorry if the pictures are a bit grim. Eye pictures usually are aren’t they? I’m not a severe case, but the fact remains that you can’t fix it. In fact, it’s quite likely to get worse.

Deep down I probably always believed that my eyes could be fixed. Surely they could, they’re not even that bad to start with. Now I sit here with pupils that are dilated from the drops they put in them, and my head hurts from the dilated pupils in an office full of computer screens and florescent lighting, and my hope is gone.

Yes I have glasses and contacts, but I will never wake up in the morning with 20/20 vision, and I will never go to bed with it.

Excuse me while I sulk about that.