The year 2008 gave us another rainy July. But a keen cyclist (like me), who refuses to use his car these days, is not deterred by this! Everybody knows that you cannot blame bad weather if you are stupid enough to choose the wrong clothes. Besides, using a cell-phone for listening to radioWelt on “Bayern-II” makes riding a bike enjoyable even when it rains
The first picture was taken on my arrival at InterFace on one of these rainy mornings. The photo was taken by our Doris (Frau Kling), who is in charge of our FOCS department (finances, organization, controlling and service). The bike I am arriving on in the picture is a Phönix model, manufactured by the Saarbrücken company “Utopia”. Not confident about their chances of successfully starting up a bike factory in 1982, which incidentally was shortly before we set up InterFace, the founders thought the name “Utopia” might be a realistic choice. However, they defied probability and became a huge success. Today, Utopia is one of the most prominent manufacturers of top-quality robust bikes. As it happens,, the “heart” of the Phönix shown in the picture is a Rohloff-14-gears mechanism, which is outrageously expensive but said to be good for 120,000 km. Like the hub dynamo and various other Phönix features, it is “Made in Germany” (!).
In the second picture, you can see me five minutes later in a meeting discussing our new Scrum poster, the prototype of which I am using for explanations. (When this poster is ready for distribution, you will be able to download it from this blog). As you can see, the cyclist stayed dry, only the hair is still a little ruffled, which shows that you can go by bike even in really bad weather. My personal experience of the transition from being a car-driver to being a cyclist is rather like my experience when I stopped smoking 28 years ago. It was then terribly hard (frankly speaking, almost impossible), but to this day I am happy about every single intake of breath without smoke. The equivalent of smoke-free breath on the bike is the free gift of physical exercise and fresh air – even when it rains.
RMD
Translation EG
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