Originally Posted by
cranky old dude
Our local weather dude claims that March 1st is Meteorlogical (SP?) Spring. He says Dec., Jan., and Feb. are the three coldest hence the winter months....and Mar., Apr. & May are the in-between months hence it's Spring.
Another view from in the snow. I'm not too thrilled about that smoking area right at the bike rack either. I've lodged a few complaints but I get the impression that I'm just being ignored. Kinda like "Oh, here comes that wierdo with the bike again."
So this is my first Spring ride and I logged a whopping 13.4 miles round trip.
I usually call it spring if we get one or more days with a temperature above 10℃ (~50℉). I remember when they first started banning smoking in the workplace, one company put the designated smoking area on the 12th floor. The smokers were jumping for joy that they didn't have to go outside to smoke, until, they started looking for the 12th floor, which is a full storey above the roof! I've noticed that a lot of buildings now state that there is no smoking within a certain distance of entrances either.
They should simply move the bike rack, actually there are some very nice racks made now that would look nice, allow more bicycle parking and take up less space. One of those 10 bike racks on a car parking space would work really well. Leave the smoking area where it is. Find out who holds the reigns to the building maintenance budget, get some rack suppliers to send you some information, your interested in two pieces of information, how much is the space required and how much does it cost (including shipping/delivery), pictures are nice. Now on a weekend, take a tape measure and go find a place for the new rack, maybe draw a map to show where a new rack would go. Measure the old rack while you are there. Now pay the maintenance budget person a visit. It's a lot easier to get a change made when all the person in charge has to do is issue a PO. Especially if it's cheap enough that they can just bury it with other things. If they don't like the cost of a new rack, then show them a couple of places where the existing rack could go. I saw one home made rack where they took a length of steel pipe, a couple of elbows and some other lengths of pipe, they buried the lengths of pipe into the ground, leaving about 1m exposed, added the elbows and the longest section of pipe in between, then welded the whole thing together, making a rather large flat U shape, nice and secure bike rack.