The Day I Went Flying

On August 27th, I had a pretty bad day.  I was riding my bike to work like the weeks before and was about one block from work.  When I was close to the last intersection that I had to pass, the pedestrian light was on.  It had started to blink that there was only twenty seconds left, but I still had plenty of time left.  However, I saw a car that wasn’t going to stop and in a split-second decision, I put the brakes on my bike.  Unfortunately for me, I used the front brakes instead of the back.  Even worse,  I had just tightened the brakes a few days earlier so they were super sensitive.  As such, when I slammed on the brakes, they were very effective!

As any science student who knows the basic laws set by Newton, although the front wheel of the bike may have suddenly stopped, there’s nothing to stop the rest of the bike or me from continuing to move forward.  As such, I continued moving forward and slid across the sidewalk on my arm and the bike flipped over me.  I later found out that my Macbook Pro had a fun meeting with the sidewalk as well.  The driver of the car stopped after they turned the corner, but with what had happened I’m not really sure what they did.  I think they saw me get up and just continued on.  Only one person actually even asked if I was OK.

I walked my bike the rest of the way to work and as I was walking up the stairs to my office the pain and reality of what happened started to hit and came out pretty strongly.  My coworkers were very sympathetic to what had happened and were very kind in helping me to try to patch up my arm (it was almost dripping blood on the floor).  Jaime, an administrative assistant, brought up a first aid kit and helped to get the wound under control.  Despite many people volunteering to take me home for the rest of the day, I ended up finishing out the work day and tried to use work as a distraction from the pain.

Well, it’s now been almost three weeks since the incident and although the physical damage to my Macbook Pro is still very much visible, my arm has healed up nicely!