Muse back!
June 05, 2006 / Monday
Bye Bye Weeble
I sold Weeble last week, the night I brought the Monster home.
Selling Weeble was surprisingly easy. Getting Weeble to leave was surprisingly hard.
I picked up the Monster around lunchtime on Wednesday. When I got back to the office, I wrote up an ad for Weeble, added pictures, and posted it on Craiglist. Within 2 hours, I had 15 replies.
I had school until 8 that night, and since it starts to get dark around then, I figured people would probably come the next day to look at it. Surprisingly, a couple guys from SF wanted to see it that night. They seemed to think it'd be sold if they waited. I guess that's probably true.
8:30 rolled around, and two guys who looked to be in their late teens or early twenties (but then, they were Asian, so maybe they weren't as young as they looked) showed up. I offered to fire up the halogen worklamp, but they declined, and instead strapped camping LEDs on their heads. This was their first bike so they didn't really know what to look for, but thanks to the wonders of teh intarwebz, they had a checklist.
It made for quite a sight. Picture Weeble, sitting in front of my garage in the dark, and two guys with LED lights strapped to their heads crouching around examining it. This went on for a while.
They asked me to start it up, so I did, with great ease. It sat there for a while with the engine running, and at some point it stopped. Engine flooded? I dunno. In any case, they were happy it started fine cold.
They examined some more, then spent a lot of time debating a test ride. They'd both taken the MSF course 6 months ago, but hadn't ridden since.
After more debating, one of them decided he'd ride it up the block.
Except that Weeble decided not to start.
We cranked and cranked to no avail. And then the battery ran low. Sorry folks, show's over. You can go home now.
But they didn't go home. They bought the bike anyway. They'd brought a truck with them, plus ramps, and they got everything set up to load the bike.
And then they couldn't figure out how to load the bike. The truck was pretty high off the ground, they had no experience pushing a bike even on flat surfaces, and I sure as hell wasn't going to run the bike up a narrow ramp while trying to jump onto a three foot high truckbed.
So they left the bike in my garage for the night. I offered to ride it up to SF for them the next day, but the battery really was drained, so I borrowed a charger from Carolyn the next night (Thanks Carolyn!) and charged it back up. It started up the next morning and I left it out front for pick up.
They put a cover and lock on Weeble during the day and came back that night to pick it up. They called to let me know and that was it. Weeble is gone. Bye bye, Weeble. Have a good life.
June 5, 2006 12:24 PM | Weeble