The dark side of the workplace

I've recently started commuting to work via my bicycle and have found it to be quite pleasant. Yesterday, as I got on my bike to ride to work, my bottle cage simply fell off. Now, anyone who knows how these things are attached to the frame via hex screws knows why I thought that this was odd. I got out my hex wrench and refastened the cage and rode to work.

When I arrived at work [ I park my bike in my cube ] the WannabePHB I've previously ranted about asked, "How was the ride in?". I gave him a strange look since I have become enemy No.1 lately as I have not agreed to be assimilated into his HPQ borg mentality. I commented that the ride was fine and ignored him for the rest of the day as per usual. On the ride home I started thinking about the odds of that bottle cage, both screws, coming loose at the same time without some sort of 'help'...then I remembered the WPHB's enquiring about how the riding was going. While I could never prove that he loosened the nuts, the coincidence of him actually talking to me by asking my bike and the cage falling off seems too unusual to dismiss as an increase in ΔG. It's not a major problem for a bottle cage to fall off but had it done this while I was in traffic it likely would have caused me some sort of injury.

Curious, I did a little poking around on workplace violence statistics and am not comforted by the high incidence especially since WPHB fits the profile nearly perfectly. It's pretty spooky. When I said my job was boring and dull I didn't mean to make it more exciting by having coworkers try to kill me :) I think I'll start parking my bike downstairs where security has a camera on them and ask them to keep an eye out for people loosening screws, hide all the hex wrenches in the toolbox at work and double-check my bike before riding from now on.

Only the paranoid survive - Andy Grove