Rode to work day

This week was Ride2Work day and I totally missed it.

Of course, in the interests of good grammar I will call it Ride To Work day, or Rode To Work day now it’s in the past tense.

Or maybe for me it should be Rode At Work day since I rode at work that day, or anyway rode on the mag trainer in the workshop watching Lowdown videos after the my flying monkeys had gone home for the day.

(Me training my staff.)

You see, I work at home and Wednesday I didn’t leave the office for business. I did make a foray by bicycle during the day though, so perhaps that counts? Yes? Or maybe you should be more fully acquainted with the full facts before you make a decision. The purpose of said journey was to pick up my car from the knock shop after Benny the Turk did such a great job of removing the big dent Sophie the Wife put in the side. I drove home with the bike on the back of the car. Still counts? No?

What counts or is anyway very telling is the fact that we have a ride to work day at all. I use any excuse I can to ride to work but I’m a fair bit less fat and wheezy than most of the population, whose only exposure to sport and exercise is through the television. As a rule, anything that can be done with a beer in hand is not sport, and this is why watching V8 racing isn’t a sport. Nor is golf. Or fielding on the boundary at cricket while chatting to your mates and sipping a brew (though it is a lot of fun).

Most Australian’s are so unaccustomed to riding or any form of exercise that even a special day isn’t enough to get them out of the car. And they sure as hell aren’t going to ride on Rode To Work days, which are all the days after Ride To Work day.

I rode to work on Rode To Work day Thursday. I had to visit a customer in the heart of Surfers Paradise, passing through an area normally reserved for commuting and parks for picnics that have now been converted into a city racetrack for the V8 racing. Apparently racing, which can be a bore to watch at the best of times, is made more interesting in proportion to the inappropriateness of the site in which it is run. I think it makes them crash more, the narrow street tracks and tight corners. The racing is awful, with few places to overtake, but people who watch motorsports are hardly aficionados of the game.

I have never seen an advertisement for motorsports without a crash in it. (Perhaps this is true of the Tour de France coverage too, where eight hours of racing is distilled down to three crashes, a break-away, two failed attacks and a sprint finish.) Things that make motorsports bearable are lots of crashes and lots of bare or nearly bare women. And speaking of the women… Of the sixty photos on the Gold Coast V8 website homepage one-third of them are of chicks. If you’ve seen your average car racing enthusiast you’ll understand why. He’s the very model of middle-aged dumpy pudgy-arsed tedium. You know what I’m saying? All the babes at racing are bought and paid for, whether models in bikinis or flown prostitutes flown up for the weekend to cash in on the the V8s.

Unfortunately event organizers brought in a boob ban in 2010. The event was getting a bad reputation for being a drunken bacchanalia for drunken middle-aged men and rather  than admit that this was the intention of the whole event organizers have attempted to clean it up. I suppose with millions of dollars of government money involved you have to pretend it’s a family event. In response to the embarrassingly large quantity of women paid to flash their tits (and no doubt many who did it for free…or scab labour as we in the Tits Union call it) at the periphery of the track the track was shortened to bi-pass the highrise where these tits were so often sighted.

(Show us your teats.)

The other thing that has outraged race goers is the burn-out ban. There is nothing like the release that comes from watching another man spin his wheels after watching eight tedious hours of cars driving loops with hardly a crash to enliven it. For race goers a V8 carnival without a burn-out is like a massage without a happy ending.

(What? No tits and no burn-outs? Why go?)

In case you’re one of my female readers, let me explain about men and massage. Men don’t generally like lying still and being kneaded like a piece of dough unless they have specific injury they want treated or they’re expecting a tug at the end.

The reasoning behind converting the same area where tens of thousands of people live work and commute into a race track is because it brings into the economy loads of dollars from all the drunken bogans who come here to piss-up and fuck prostitutes for the weekend. Our local rag, the Gold Coast Sun, ran an article mid-week about how much money the local vendors can expect to make from this event. One guy runs a bottle shop right in the heart of Surfers, so you know he’s going to be busy right? According to the paper he makes as much as half a week’s sales in just two days… Wait. What? That’s just one and a half days extra takings. Another guy  in the same article runs a pub and is quoted as saying he’ll order an extra 10% more grog. Ten percent? I can only hope the journo is some small town hick (eg Gold Coast) who got his figures wrong. I used to work the Melbourne Cup and I can tell you that we were awash with the cash made on that one day. We had a team of a dozen people madly counting cash before the Armaguard guys arrived. And we still had over $10,000 left uncounted that I had to push down the main straight of Kensigton to bank the following Monday. We bank rolled a whole year of losses with the Spring Carnival.  If the best this event can do is generate an extra 10% sales then you may as well close it down now. Please.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Time limit is exhausted. Please reload the CAPTCHA.