Okay. Here is the story. Yesterday was a day of many travails.

I got to work, only to realize that I had forgotten my wallet. So a couple of hours later, I hopped back on my bike and cycled to the Seattle Center and to my car to get my wallet, then returned to work.

I needed my wallet because I was going to buy a prepaid cell phone, just to have in cases of extreme need. So I called Cingular, whose phone I had decided to buy (only to find out today that I should have got Virgin, which is like a third cheaper per minute, but somehow I missed them. Sigh. Ah well, the Cingular phone is much better, so maybe that is worth $30 a year extra), and they only had one left.

But I could not go get it right away because I had to go to a client meeting, and the store would not put it on hold for me. Three hours later, I get back from the meeting and hopped on my bike for the fourth time that day, and jetted up to Cingular on Capital Hill, mere blocks from Josh's place.

I strolled into the store, tossing my bike against the bike rack. The store is a shambles. There is not a single display phone that is not broken in some way. Most of them are in several pieces.

Altogether, it looks like a hypothetical salesman's attempt to up-sell insurance. "See, these things are crap! I pulled this one (holds up jagged shards of phone with electronics hanging out) brand-new out of the box this morning, and just the impact of setting it down on the counter (points to feather bed-covered counter) caused this to happen."

There are two sales-people, and four people in the store. Kevin, the guy who would not hold the phone for me earlier, is helping a couple get set up on new service. The other sales girl is doing paperwork or something.

A customer I initially take to be a homeless person come in to get out of the cold actually turns out to be a customer who has the air of someone who has been waiting a long time and is resigned to an even longer wait to come.

"We usually have more help," the same hypothetical sales guy would say, "but when I put the phone down on the counter (same indications as before) this morning, the exploding shards put my other two sales associates in the hospital. Don't worry -- they are going to be okay. But this is what I am telling you. You really need the replacement insurance."

I lurked around for a bit, trying to admire the broken phones, but found I really just could not care. I wanted them to give me my freakin' phone-in-a-box and let me get out. I finally settled into a chair to stare vacantly out at the passing wildlife on Pine & Broadway out of the store's enormous plate glass windows.

"Eh, at least I can watch my bike," I thought to myself, completely unaware of the foreshadowing which was by now an inch thick. About a week later, the second sales lady looked up at the homeless-guy-cum-customer, and said, "okay, I can start helping you now, though Kevin (indicating Kevin, still locked in a death-struggle with page one of the paperwork for the new customers couple) will probably finish for you."

The guy wanted a new phone because his had broken in some particularly dramatic way (it did not occur to me until right now that he may well have been a Cingular plant in the store to help with up-selling the insurance. Though, in fairness, it has occurred to me that this entry contains way too many parentheticals).

"Well, the good news is that your phone is still under warranty," she said, after tapping and staring at her computer for forty minutes. I meanwhile, am still sitting, watching my bike, watching people walk back and forth, getting on with their lives, doing big and important things, falling in love, getting married, having the children who grow up to someday help the next customer in this Cingular store.

"The bad news, though," she continued brightly, "is that we do not have any of your phone in stock. We should be getting some next week." Amazingly, he was cool with this. He asked if another store had it, and she said, "oh, we don't have any other stores. Oh, well, there is one other store, at Northgate." He finally gave up and went away, presumably to come back next week.

The amazing part of this story is not that my bike is about to be stolen, but that I am still even in the store at this point. Yes indeed, I may be the guy fighting for the last dinner roll on the Titanic, but you have to admire my tenacity.

I am just admiring the new model year hovercars out the window, and thinking how well the robots are mixing with the people on the slidewalk, when the salesgirl finally turns to me and asks what she can do for me.

Even though everyone who I might have wanted to call is now long in their graves, I stick to my guns. "I would like a prepaid phone," I explain. "Kevin said you had one of the 3395's still on hand." She fishes it out of the back room. Success! We fill out paperwork.

At some random point, she hands it off to Kevin (I have no idea where his customers went. I had been looking out the window all this time, and they were sitting behind me. I suspect they died of old age and their bodies have decomposed to dust by now. This does not stop me from moving to his desk and dropping into one of his dusty chairs).

Kevin gets ninety percent of the way through finishing my paperwork before the phone rings, and he gets into a long and involved discussion with someone in Portland, OR, who is apparently insisting that Kevin hop in a car and bring him a new phone, since his exploded. (Again, why am I still here?)

Kevin says, "I am afraid not. If you can come here, I can exchange it for you. Or you could send me a mailer and I could drop a phone into it." Then, and I kid you not, they repeat exactly their same arguments over and over and over again, with no difference at all in content and only a slightly rising irritation in Kevin's inflection marking any progress on the call.

Kevin finally puts the guy on hold and runs the authorization on my credit card, and blissfully, I am out of the store!

It is 4:30pm, I know not of which day, month, or year, but I figure I will hop on my bike, coast down the hill into downtown Seattle, and see if Saltmine, or indeed, even the Internet, still exists, and perhaps work for half an hour before calling it a day. I turn towards the bike rack, and... no bike.

My first thought is to go back into the store and tell Kevin that my bike has been stolen. Stockholm syndrome, I guess.

"My bike has been stolen," I say out loud, to myself. And what are you going to do? I laugh out loud, accept it, and start walking down the hill to work.

So after four months, I finally managed to get my bike stolen. I had to go to Capital Hill to get it done. Sadly, Paul's helmet was with the bike, and was almost certainly worth more than the bike was. I will miss that helmet.

The funniest thing about the whole episode is that the bike was in sight the entire time I was in the store. If I had been paying better attention, I could have witnessed the very moment it was stolen, and hypothetically even done something about it. But I wasn't, so I couldn't and didn't.

The point is, though, that I have been leaving my bike unlocked against the sides of buildings, around corners, blocks away, and it has been fine. And then the time it gets stolen is almost literally right under my nose.

It is like a reminder that I cannot control fate. A sort of "you know not the day or the hour" thing. The only downsides (besides having to bus/walk back to my car Tuesday afternoon) were an irritating sense of having been taken advantage of, and a heightened suspicion of everyone I saw on a bike for the next two days.

I would see a rolling two-wheeled guy, and laser in on him, seeing if he was on my bike or not. But that is passing. I am figuring that my thief really needed a bike for some very pressing cause. Plus, of course, the irony that he stole the world's crappiest bike. I picture him riding away, maybe hurrying to make his getaway, and the rear wheel starts popping around, bouncing him up and down like he is riding a bucking horse. I really had been meaning to get around to fixing that tire. So it goes. Ah well.

My Thanksgiving task, when I get home tonight, is to replace the tube on my father's old bike, which gets promoted to be the next bike-to-be-stolen.

ScottMcJ, single-handedly seeding the city with used bikes...