Bikes and Borders

You might have seen this in my old blog, but I got a new bike (maybe I'll remember to post about it here sometime). Sadly, that meant that the old bike had to go. I finally found a buyer last week, with just one quirk -- he was in Canada. He said he'd handle the shipping and import/export stuff, so I figured it was just like a local sale for me. Ha. Ha. Ha.
The fun started last Friday afternoon, I got a call from the import broker. "Hey, the truck is 100 miles away and it'll be there in 2 hours, eh." Luckily I was already out of the office, so I finished prepping the bike and rode it to my old office (which has a semi-height loading dock). I got to the dock around 3:45, and waited for the driver to arrive. At 5, I hadn't heard from anyone so I called the shipping company, who said they'd have the driver contact me. He finally did -- and that was when I knew this wasn't a local sale. I'm pretty sure he said his name was Gennady, but beyond that I wasn't sure about 2 out of 3 words I heard (and I'm pretty good at decoding poor English). I eventually discerned that his computer wasn't giving him good directions and he wanted to know how to reach me. I tried to figure out where he was at the time, but that just didn't work so he asked for my ZIP code. Satisfied with that, he said he'd call me back.
Call back he did -- about 45 minutes later, to tell me that he was at "Pilot." It's about a mile from the office, so I was happy to give him simple directions from there to here. Unfortunately, simple is a relative thing -- he couldn't understand that he would be going under the nearby interstate, rather than onto it. 10 minutes of saying, "No, don't get ON, go UNDER" still left me with an uneasy feeling, but I figured I wasn't helping by keeping him on the phone. We said goodbye, and you can probably guess what happened next. 20 minutes later, he called to say that he was on the interstate and several miles south of the office. I resisted the urge to throw my phone in his general directions, and instead gave him the even simpler updated directions to our office (literally, exit and make 2 right turns). Another 15 minutes passed with no sign of the truck, so I walked to the corner for a look. I could see what looked like a trailer parked about half a mile away, going in the other direction. He called to say that he had taken a left instead of a right and was having some trouble turning around on the narrow road. I didn't have a lot of advice for him except that he was on the right road and needed to go in the other direction. Another 10 minutes and I finally saw the truck headed down the road towards me. I was cheering like Mickey for Rocky by this point, until I noticed something: the truck wasn't getting any closer. Cars were driving around it. WHAT??? He called, and I started yelling like a crazy man to "keep going, you're almost here." So, to cut the story off abruptly and for no reason, he finally showed up and we got the bike loaded into the truck. I left the dock around 7:15 -- 3.5 hours after I got there. Whew!

Let this be a lesson to you, kids: when all else fails, blame Canada.