Annoyingly, that imposter’s video on how to prevent bike theft has viewership stats to die for, having been watched by an engrossed global audience of 532,000 people: Here I am, the preview image for an advice video from “Cycling Tips with D-Man”. Here I am, a visual metaphor for the 20,000 bike thefts annually in Dublin!: As a result, it’s been steadily appropriated elsewhere, sending my criminal career international. That quick photo of my fictional bike heist remains the number-one result when you do an image search for ‘bike theft’. I won’t pretend to know all that much about search engine optimisation, but whatever happened when that picture was saved to an image library back in the day was a masterclass. Steadily, I began to get the impression that I was on my way to becoming the internet’s favourite vessel for its hatred of bike thieves. At a point soon after that, it became a semi-regular occurrence – just browsing about, and being confronted with my younger self apparently caught at the climax of an unforgivable act. The internet works in mysterious ways, and within a couple of years I’d seen the image pop up randomly on Facebook. The hoodie was eye-rollingly clichéd, and if you look closely enough you can see the skinny jeans I lived in at the time, along with the obnoxious business shirt tucked into them, and some sneakers I’d borrowed from a friend’s locker because ironic brogues weren’t really selling it.Ī few quick snaps of the shutter in that laneway off Chinatown and the die was cast: we had a picture, and any personal reputational damage would surely die with the next print deadline. If you squint in Google Street View you can just about make out the scene of the crime – up the back of a ravine between buildings, past a roller door, chained to a no-standing sign set in cobblestones that have never seen the sun: The scene of the crime.ĭid I make a convincing bike thief? Dear reader, I did not. So I brought a black band hoodie in from home, and, one autumnal morning, pretended to steal someone’s bike in an alleyway behind the office. All the bike thieves in our stock photo archive looked a bit shit, but we had a bike, a camera, a big bolt-cutter, and a can-do attitude. Who knows? Melbourne’s a big city, but I had big dreams.įor one edition of the (now defunct) magazine a colleague had written an article about her bike being stolen, and we needed a feature image. Things were looking up. In those days my heart sometimes whispered a quiet dream to my brain, that maybe one day I’d make a mark on the world. My jeans were tight, my hair was long, I was in the gory core of my 20s, and I was trying to make my way in life.Īfter several aeons of diligent study and many more working at a bike shop while trying to get a job as a writer, I’d finally landed a gig at a cycling magazine for an advocacy organisation.
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