Originally Posted by
Trakhak
A mother came in with her 14-year-old son, complaining that this was the third time she'd had to bring back his bike for gear adjustments in the two months since she'd boought it for him and that she'd demand her money back if she had to bring it back again.
I say to the son, "Have you been trying to adjust the gears?" The mother answers, "I asked him that and he said no."
I must have looked skeptical, because she then says, "MY SON DOESN'T LIE TO ME!"
I look at the son. The son looks at me sheepishly.
I take the bike downstairs to the repair area and adjust the gears. I then add touchup paint to the theads and heads of the derailleur adjustment screws. When I bring the bike back upstairs, I explain that I've painted the adjustment screws so that if someone has been fooling around with the derailleur adjustments, they'll know it by the cracked paint. As far as I know, the gear adjustment problem never recurred.
No offense to you, but I've been riding multi-geared bikes for 35+ years, and in all of those years I've gotten a bike back from the shop that shifted perfectly exactly once. Bikes shift differently under load than they do on the stand. IME at a minimum they (nearly always) require a bit of a turn on a barrel adjuster after they've been in the shop. (I've even gotten a bike back from the shop that wouldn't shift into the highest gear (lowest cog), and I had to back out the limit screw.) Bike shops are great, they're one of my favorite places on Earth, and I pay them to do a lot of stuff I'm not competent to do or that I just don't want to do. I also pay them to fix my boneheaded mistakes when I've screwed up a repair/maintenance/install task. However, mechanics are human, they sometimes have to rush to satisfy everyone, and you never know who's been working on your bike (especially in the summer when the shop may have hired on some teenagers to help during the busy season).
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