Bikes

I’m working from home today and the kids are here with me.  It’s the first time all of the schedules have worked out this way and wouldn’t you know it, it’s the last Thursday of their summer vacation.

They spent most of the day doing what most kids prefer doing during summer vacation:  They sat on the couch watching Disney Channel On-Demand.  They may have snuck in a Disney movie on Netflix too.  Not sure about that.

Anyway, round about 3:30 (half an hour ago) they decided to go for a bike ride.  Excellent.  They both have two year old brand new bikes that if they have been used more than twice (hence my calling them two years old AND brand new) I’ll eat my hat.  I told them to check for flat tires, knowing full well that there would be four of them, and that there is a bike pump out there with their helmets.  Twenty minutes later they come in and tell me that they can’t figure out the pump. 

The pump is as simple as a bike pump can be.  Put the nozzle on, clamp it down, pump, take the nozzle off.  They couldn’t figure it out.  I think they may have been trying to put the nozzle over the air tube’s cap.  I demonstrated and came back inside.  10 minutes later I get called out again.  They still can’t figure it out.  When they take the pump off of one of the tires it goes flat again.  I did it for them, and I think there was a leak in there somewhere, but it was really just a matter of pulling the two pieces apart quickly and putting the cap on. 

My first thought through all of this was, these are the two smartest kids I’ve ever met (and I grew up with a lot of really, really smart kids) and they can’t figure this out?  Has Disney Channel melted their brains?

No, that can’t be it.  Next I started trying to think of how I learned to use a bike pump.  Someone must have demo’d it to me at some point.  But who?  And when?  And how?

There are two morals to this story.  One is to stop being an asshole and taking for granted that the kids know everything.  They know a ton of stuff about a ton of stuff, but they don’t know everything, and just because you were bike riding 10 hours a day when you were eight years old doesn’t mean that two genius level kids who barely ever ride bikes will know what you knew.

The second moral is… You’re getting old and forgetting stuff.  Stop doing that!