K-kinda Busy

• Over the winter, a second telephone was installed in the shop. Unlike the first (a 1962 rotary Ericsson in orange), it's a modern wireless job with an incessant ring. The sound is worse than a baby's wail; it's worse than nails on a chalkboard; it's so bad that I'd much rather answer it than suffer the peal. Over the winter, the telephone rings very rarely. Or, rather, I imagine that it rings very rarely, because I'm rarely in the shop to find out. If a phone rings in an empty bike shop, does it make a sound?

  But it's spring, and not only are there rings, but there are RINGS and RINGS and RINGS. There were so many rings this afternoon, and so many questions, and so many zombie cyclists, rising from the dead -- dragging their dusty-rusty steeds out from their cobwebby basement tombs. And on this rare day, because there were already so many outgoing calls to be made (Schwalbe, Focus, EDGE, FSA, Phil Wood, Velocity, Schwalbe again, Rouleur) it was simply more expedient to answer these rings than to ignore them.

  "I'm sorry, but the shop is k-kinda busy."

  Folks just want a bit of a tune-up, but I'm knee-deep in CX Rays; Foci are piling up at the door; and there are not two, but now *three* S&S coupled steel frames to design this week.

  "Try Blue City Cycles."

  "The Bike Doctor."

  "Blackstone? It's near the law school."

  "Yojimbo's of course."

  Of course, it occurs to me that every shop must be suffering from the same dilemma. That said, it's very tempting, as one customer suggested, to simply forward the shop line for a month of two until things quiet down. He suggests the Foreign Car Hospital. I was thinking Valois.