Two Wheeled Life Part 7

 Two Wheeled Life Part 7

Now with a secure job and summers free, we saw no reason to return to the USA once we departed for the summer tour season. The boss flew back and forth to deal with office tasks and to prepare for each new tour, leaving us with no work to do...and no salary. But we did get the use of the one of the leased vans and eventually talked the boss into giving us the funds we were saving him on airfares so we could have some fun in Italy.

We'd stay there until the last minute when we had to report for duty in Paris for LeTour, visiting friends and Heather's Italian "family". They were the family of a journalist Heather had met back in her college days in Virginia. There was a race put on by the Tour de France organizers on the east coast of the US and she volunteered (she was studying Italian) as a translator for foreign journalists and was assigned to this sports writer, one who actually was the ghost-writer for Italian star Felice Gimondi.

She'd visited the family in Italy after this but her new husband was really keen to finally meet these folks, especially the journalist's brother Giacomo, who worked with various Italian pro teams as a part-time helper. We rode with Giacomo a few times, once with sprint star Giovanni Fidanza. We'd also visit places in Italy other than those we'd experience with following the Giro. A few years later we arrived for a visit armed with a world champion, rainbow-striped jersey I'd been collecting autographs from every world champion we met. My idea was to get our friend to ask Felice Gimondi to autograph it for me since they were friends and he'd told us in advance he'd be going to a dinner in honor of the local hero.

But somehow I'd forgotten to bring it! A frantic search while our friend waited yielded nothing but regrets, as he was already late for the festivities. Imagine my shock and delight the next day when we returned to their house and have our friend toss down to us a jersey from his first-floor balcony. What was this? A world champion, rainbow-striped jersey autographed and personalized for us by Felice Gimondi! And another one, this the famous Maglia Rosa of Giro d'Italia fame as Gimondi had won that too. These are framed in our home today.

Our friend was a boyhood of Pietro Santini, maker of cycling clothing, including jerseys for world champions and Giro winners. When I couldn't find my jersey our friend stopped by Santini's factory and grabbed a pair of jerseys, taking them to the dinner and having Gimondi sign them for us! How lucky am I to have friends like this?

Those Giro d'Italia groups remained small in comparison to LeTour, which was fine by us! The boss plus the two of us and maybe another mechanic or translator made things much easier, especially when combined with the "hospitality gene" that most Italian hotel and restaurant owners had vs their French counterparts. Running a more normal cycling tour in Tuscany and later one in the Dolomite mountains let us really enjoy our work, our cycling and of course eating and drinking the best food and wine on earth.

On the other hand, LeTour was still a huge project, at one point the boss scored a couple of TV "up close and personal" type promo features on the ESPN sports channel. This jacked-up demand even more, though the limit was still three groups of five vans (120 guests) for each of the Tour segments over the three week race. Jacking up demand even more, American Lance Armstrong had come on the scene as LeMond's career wound down, including winning his own world champion rainbow-striped jersey in 1993. I had mine ready when we finally caught up with him! More staff was needed and I drafted in some cycling friends, some of whom worked out better than others. The Swiss guy was still with us, bringing his brother into the program while the boss found a couple of Canadian guys to help as well. The second mechanic recruited a mechanic friend of his too.

The operation was large but the boss did a good job organizing everything, at least most of the time. He'd make reservations with more than one hotel in an area and sometimes forget to cancel the one he decided not to use. Once we arrived at a race stage start and some of the clients decided to pop into a hotel/bar to use the toilet. Ooops! This hotel turned out to be one of those the boss failed to cancel and when clients walked in with the company logo on t-shirts, they thought the group had arrived!

When the clients simply started walking out, the hotel manager followed them, making a rather ugly scene that Heather had to translate/referee. Eventually she started using what I call "translator's prerogative" to deal with a lot of situations. It was mostly making the boss think she was asking for whatever stupid thing it was he wanted, but making the Italians understand the situation and coming up with the best solution. The boss had no clue and most of the time was content with the results though more than once she'd organized something that would delight the guests but leave the boss fuming. We'd become indispensable...or so we thought.

A few years later the boss brought a new galpal to the Giro d'Italia. She was keen to befriend everyone, especially the couple who did most of the work....us. We tried our best to be nice to her and succeeded enough for me to be part of their wedding party a few years later. Heather had completed her PhD studies and had only her dissertation to complete so we moved back to Southern California.

The idea was to work at the bike tour company office in addition to the summer tours. This way the newly wedded boss could spend more time his when she wasn't away on her flight attendant job. The hours were great, the work (at least at first) was fun, but the pay wasn't all that great, leaving me to find more work at a local bike shop, one started by a former employee of the one I started at years before. We needed to build-up another financial war-chest to survive a job search period once Heather was a real PhD looking for a teaching job.

This period started with the boss' wedding, leaving me to run the office during their honeymoon. It soon became clear that with two of us there, one was redundant and with the office in their house, it was more awkward than either of us had thought. The boss had a condo in a resort community a few hours away so most of the time he'd be there while I'd be at the home office, picking up the mail and checking in each day on what was going on.

It turned out the boss was doing a lot more golfing than working. That was fine with me, I was enjoying riding my bicycle for a few hours, taking the long way to his office, showering and sitting down to work, then doing the same thing at day's end. Friday and Saturday I'd work at the bicycle shop with Sunday totally free. Heather promised if she could concentrate solely on her PhD dissertation she'd have it done and be a real PhD in two years. I was determined to help make this happen. 

A few things combined to really make this a challenge - first was the all too typical "boss' wife" syndrome. That friendly girlfriend, eager to be liked, turned into a person with a lot of opinions on how things should be done, despite having no real skills or experience with cycling or the cycling business. She was a flight attendant so they scored first-class airfares when it was time to head to Europe...as long as they could fit the schedule, which had them showing up late or leaving early more than once.

The second issue was seeing "how the sausage was made" by being in the office full-time. The way this guy ran his business was tough for me to take. Way too much "It's just business" when he'd do things I didn't approve of, but it reflected on me as an employee. Combine this with the golfing, which created a mad scramble each spring before our departure for Europe with me asking why this all work wasn't done long before rather than put off until the last-minute?  Add the stressful summer work (especially at LeTour) and the wife's inserting herself into things she had no business being involved in and the once-friendly relationship began to crack.

Perhaps the final straw was my effort to screen-out potential problem clients. We'd still had a few, but one post tour discussion came to how few there were in recent seasons, despite the increased size of the entourage. These were the seasons that I was in the office so I took credit for this, saying since I was in the office full-time answering the phones and taking reservations, I'd begun to subtly discourage people who sounded like potential problems. At the same time I'd been keeping close track of how soon in each reservation period things were sold-out. The sold-out period had come sooner each season despite my efforts. I was proud that I'd reduced those problem client numbers, but the boss was not. Once again I'd exceeded my authority.

We were more and more treated as just "the help" in too many ways now but we toughed it out until Heather was a full professor, then moved to Iowa for her first teaching job at a small, private, liberal arts college. The boss still wanted us for the summer tour work and we figured with much less contact over the year things could still work out well. They didn't.

Tour de France interest waned wth Greg Lemond's retirement and after American star Armstrong's career was derailed due to testicular cancer. Interest in the Giro d'Italia was steady and the challenging tours that didn't follow events did well too, but there also was increasing competition combined with that overall shrinking market. And now there was nobody in the office to screen-out potential problem clients, as the boss went back to his "exclusive vacations" idea...excluding anyone not capable of writing a check that would clear! 

Complaints went up and employee morale (not just ours) went down. Heather's academic career began to blossom and she wanted to attend conferences that sometimes conflicted with the tour schedule. She announced that she'd be unavailable for the final one in the French Alps in 1998 but I would stay on as one of two mechanics, sharing a room with the other guy. The boss had his wife there along with a female translator.

Meanwhile, the 1998 races were exciting! Smaller groups were less stressful and Italian Marco Pantani's wins in both Giro and Tour made for exciting race-watching and happy clients. The tours in Tuscany and the Italian Dolomites had gone well too. All that was left was a tour of the French Alps, so Heather flew away to Greece from Paris post-Tour while we packed up vans to head to Geneva, Switzerland. The boss had arranged storage there for most of his equipment now that he picked-up leased vans there for a quick drive to Italy to begin the season each year, so at the season end we'd just pack it all up and fly back to the USA from Geneva.

The problem client issue reared its head again on this tour. We always had a few, from the lady who insisted her seat on a high-speed train in France face forward. Something about not facing the direction of travel was a big deal. A group of friends wrote a letter to a well-known cycling magazine, making a lot of rather silly complaints. Luckily they gave us a heads-up notice so we (as in me) could draft a response letter. One the magazine editors read that, the whole thing was dropped.

A lot of self-styled experts showed up to challenge themselves on the famous climbs of the Tour de France or Giro d'Italia, more than one without the equipment (as in low enough gears to get up them) needed for their less than stellar legs to get 'em up the mountain. Over the years I'd assembled an extensive spare parts box, eventually leaving in-storage each year along with the company's equipment. Having spare parts reduced the challenge of finding a bicycle shop when something broke.

In addition to those spare parts I soon added drive-train parts - chainrings and cogsets in sizes useful for big mountain climbs as too many clients failed to arrive with bicycles optimized for this kind of cycling. Labor to install these parts was included as part of the tour, but the parts were sold at a normal retail price so I could replenish the stock. Some clients began to take advantage of the "free" labor, showing up with a bike that had obviously not been attended to recently. 

Few things annoyed me (and the other mechanics) as much as hearing "Well, it's been doing that for awhile." when they asked us to work on their bike. As if the tour included a free bicycle tuneup rather than having skilled mechanics on-hand just-in-case! There were a few of these folks on this alpine tour, making extra work for me and the other mechanic, my roommate. 

Worse, it was a very hot summer in 1998, making sleeping in a hotel without air-conditioning tough, even in the mountains. My roommate was a mechanic un-interested in riding a bicycle, especially on climbs like these but I eagerly rode them every chance I got in addition to the rest of my workload. The combination of Heather's absence, the heat and some bad feelings I was getting from the boss made this a tough tour. He was getting complaints from the clients about poor-quality hotels and meals too, making things worse.

One of those problem clients sparked the first fireworks. This guy had already been exactly the kind of client I would have screened-out, but here he was. A constant pain with a different mechanical issue seemingly every day. The problem was not his bike, it was him. With one riding day left he asked that his handlebar stem be changed. There was nothing wrong, he just wanted to try a longer one, with one day left in the tour. Back then this was a tedious job and when informed by the boss after a big day riding in the mountains while the other mechanic did the support work that I'd been chosen for this task, I simply refused. I had ridden all day vs driving the support van, but I just wasn't going to do the work to change this guy's stem for the last of 10 days of cycling!

The boss had my roommate do it instead. My roommate grumbled about how silly it was and understood why I'd refused, leaving it to him. One more day to go before we returned to Geneva to say au revoir to Mr. Stem. Sparks really started to fly the next afternoon when the boss quickly ran up to his room, showered and came back very nicely dressed and announced, as we scrambled and sweated helping clients repack their bikes in-between taking apart bicycle racks and stripping the vans of advertising logos, that he and his wife had to leave right away!

No emergency, other than their first-class, free flight schedule had been changed and they had to leave right now! I couldn't help but wonder how long they'd known this but decided to spring it on us at the last minute? So it was up to the two mechanics and the translator to pack everything up for the storage people, take clients to the airport and return the leased vans tomorrow before we departed? The final insult was he insisted my roommate drive them to the airport, leaving even more work for me! For some reason the translator couldn't do this.

I was ready to quit but thought that if we continue working for this operation, some things are going to change. We enjoyed a last meal in Geneva paid for with the company's credit card which the boss later complained was too expensive. It seemed the boss had decided some things needed changing too.

Changes arrived that fall with a new program proposed by our boss. He claimed he was giving us a raise in our per-day compensation but when the schedule was reviewed we noticed that we'd actually be working fewer days. Not fewer tours, just fewer days as the arrival/departures had been set up for the same day - each tour ended with airport transfers as the next one started, with airport transfers. So in reality it was more work for about the same pay.

We'll never know if this was a ploy to force us to quit, but it worked just the same. We decided to create CycleItalia and do it our way in Italy exclusively, within days.