Friday, April 23, 2010

The New Wheel

It sure was nice to roll the bicycle out of the garage and pump a little extra air into the tires and head off for the first ride of the year. I heard one or two lawnmowers buzzing, and the tulips were nodding extravagantly in so many front yards, and the dogwoods were blooming—what, maybe a month ahead of time? Spring on a bicycle in the Midwest, that’s just great. I even started riding to work again.

But then the rear tire went flat and I was out of business. Just as well, I thought—I’d take the thing to the nearest bike shop for an end-of-winter tune-up, a new tube, and I’d be back on the road. They said I could pick up the bike in a week and a half. A week and a half? Well, we have to adapt to the schedule of the experts who serve us, don’t we?

But on pickup day the shop called to say that there was a problem. When the mechanic took the rear wheel off to work on the flat tire, the gearshift mechanism fell to pieces on the floor. It couldn’t be fixed; a replacement wheel was $200.

Needless to say, I was suspicious. I brought in a flat tire, and now I needed a whole new wheel? I drove over to the shop. The mechanic showed me the parts that had fallen off the hub and he pointed out that there was no way to reattach them. He had carefully checked the manufacturer’s website; he had spoken to the bike shop that specialized in this brand. So he repeated the bad news: I needed a new wheel. What did I know? He was the expert.

But I still didn’t see how we leaped from flat tire to broken gearshift, so I asked: Which of these parts is the broken one? How does the thing ordinarily attach to the hub? His answer wasn’t clear. He was the expert, but he couldn’t help me understand how the thing worked. As with so many of our encounters with experts, it looked like I simply had to take his word for it. But I wasn’t quite persuaded; something wasn’t right. Why couldn’t he show me clearly how it was supposed to work? So I packed up the bike and headed across town to the shop where I bought it a couple of years ago. That mechanic took one look and said, Yeah, those are hard to work on.  He fiddled with the pieces for a bit and tried to recall the precise steps that would turn this loose jumble of parts into a locked unit that would attach itself to the hub.  After a couple of minutes he had it, though, and he handed the bike back over to me. Out in the parking lot, everything worked fine—gears shifting, the spring air blowing past me and taking my unhappiness with it. The bike was fixed, no charge. No $200 replacement wheel either.

It would be easy to stay angry at the mechanic who failed to make the fix, but it was a pretty challenging little mechanism, I could see. But the episode remains a clue about expertise. Most of us work jobs where other people depend on our expertise, and our judgments and advice can make quite an impact on their lives. Even if we’re good at our work, occasionally we get out to the edge of our knowledge where we might not know much more than the people we’re supposed to serve. That’s where we have to be extra careful. When we are operating as experts, it turns out, we need to understand not only what we know, but also what we don’t know. How about that?

Now who’s up for a bike ride?

Broadcast by Ken Smith on April 23, 2010 • WVPE's Audio Archive
Nature & Outdoors • Sports & Recreation • Work • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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