Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Meetin' Time

Riding a bike is one thing I look forward to upwards of 5 days a week. Sometimes, it doesn’t happen at all because I work for THE MAN, but I always look forward to my next ride.

Running a local social club/cycling team can deflate the joy of looking forward to my next spin, and on occasion, it occupies my mind on a ride. That is bad. I need the stress release to function normally, and thinking about local politics on a ride doesn’t sit well with me.

Recently, we (myself and two other “Board Members”) restructured our team for 2009, and promptly forced a split in the team that we were prepared for. 12 riders are in favor of our new direction, 8 are against, and 10 are completely indifferent or didn’t even care enough to respond. The sticking point is race reimbursements. We want to eliminate them completely, and the 8 opponents want to be paid to race. So, the choice is pretty clear for the 8 – and there are three of them:

1.) buy into the new structure and stay on board
2.) leave the team
3.) get a group together of existing team members and we’ll hand over the keys to a new Board.

Simple as that. The showdown, goes down, downtown, tonight at 7:30pm. I really don’t care all that much about how it shakes down so long as the decision falls into the above listed choices. I’m going to pull my best Samuel L. Jackson impression and try, try real hard, to be a good Shepherd - instead of losing my cool and calling out some of the people there that I strongly disagree with. The perfect scenario would be that we keep the team in our control, the party of 8 buys in, and we ease on down the road. #2 would be to hand over the keys to the team, quit, and then promptly start a new team with our group of 12. #3 would be we keep the team, everybody stays, and then the disgruntled ones backstab us in the community over their dissatisfaction. It’s happened every year, so……..yeah, not fun.

We could be dicks and just kick ‘em out…..but then I remember that we’re 40 year old adults and that seems a bit High Schoolish. Nope – I think its best to put the decision in their hands and accept it. I wouldn’t even wager on the outcome because I honestly have no idea how it’ll end up.

Here we go…….

5 comments:

  1. switch to running. superior economy of time. plus, you get to wear short shorts and compression socks. look for a surprise in your mailbox... ae

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  2. I know a dude, no names here, that switched to running. The reason: his rigid, big wheeled, single speed with drop bars was so hard to ride that it started to bother his female parts.

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  3. I think I know that guy....but that's not a mountain bike he rides, it's a hermaphrobike.

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  4. Hermaphrobike. I think this could very well be the new team name. It will be the ultimate showdown between the Small Town D-Bags and th Hermaphrobikers. Yes! Pay Per VIEW!

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