Craigslist can kill you. No joke.

Craigslist is useful. Very much useful. Super useful. And sometimes even a little rubbish! Or hogwash, as you would call it here. And by hogwash I mean all the scams. All the fake ads that have one purpose only: getting into your pockets. Bastards.

But would you ever have thought, it can actually also be dangerous. Like really, really dangerous? Dangerous like as in riding-a-motorcycle-with-no-good-breaks-and-no-working-turn-signals-on-a-5-lane-highway-not-knowing-how-fast-you-are-going-because-the-speedo-just-broke-5-miles-back-and-with-no-mirrors-as-they-couldn’t-be-adjusted-properly? Add to this something-is-leaking-and -you-don’t-flipping-know-what-and-how and you have a pretty accurate depiction of my heroic purchase of a crappy motorcycle on craigslist. Oh boy, was that a ride.

I have to be honest with you. At some point I wasn’t really positive about whether I would live to see another sunrise. Or in what medical condition I would see it. Especially when I noticed that liquid running down my right leg. My first thought was “Strange, I’m pretty sure this bike does not have a water cooled engine… So what can this possibly be? Oil?” Well, a quick glance revealed it was the exact same fuel I put in my motorbike just half an hour ago. I tried to pull over as fast and as safely as I could, which was no easy feat having no turn signals and no mirrors to help me. And the knowledge of fuel splashing on the hot engine block does not precisely help, either.

Anyways, once I made it safely on the service lane I stopped (or rather “was stopping”, as to my perception the past continuous highlights the ongoing process of this undertaking because of the not really working brakes quite well) and saw how more fuel was splashing onto the hot engine block – still no decent sight, to be frank. Luckily it took me only couple of seconds to figure out that a little tube which runs from the tank to the carburettor was disconnected. So I pushed that little thingy back in place and continued my nice Sunday afternoon ride.

-JP

Jon Parli
jparli@mail.sfsu.edu

Business and Psychology student from Switzerland doing an exchange semester at SFSU. If you happen to have any question, shoot me a message.

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