The fight for temperature
If you bike 30 kilometres before sitting down to your desk, you’ll be hot in the closed office. Unlike your chilly colleagues who get wrapped up in scarves at 25 °C because they always feel some draught blowing on their back or neck. The result is a never-ending battle to determine if and when you’ll air the room. If you do so, you have to put up with reproachful looks and some theatrical coughing on top of that.
Coming out
Despite your strategy to always get to work 15 minutes before everyone else, it’s inevitable that one day your colleagues will get a glimpse of you wearing Lycra, and you’ll have to come out of the closet. In the aftermath, your colleagues will put on their shocked grimaces and ask if you train for the Tour de France and shave your legs.
Always near your gear
“Why are you always carrying all that junk?” is a question you’re asked at least once a week. Usually you ride light, but that’s not possible when commuting to work, because you need to pack a laptop, a charger, your everyday shoes, some clothing, a towel, a pump, some tools, a spare tube, a banana, a deodorant, and a snack. No wonder you resemble a paratrooper before entering enemy territory, attacking your colleagues with your clumsiness in the lift.
Hanging in the air
Changing from your cycling garments into your everyday clothing means you need to hang your damp clothes somewhere to dry, which is understandable for some and less understandable for others. So during the day, your slowly drying tights move about from the kitchenette to the utility room, then to the storeroom, to the boiler and finally end up in the IT office, where nobody really notices them thanks to all the modems and cables.
A sitting duck
“Less pedalling, more working” is something you’ll hear so often that you’ll soon get used to it and won’t even bother to hide that website of a cycling second-hand shop showing Italian bikes on steel frames.
