Getting what you pay for

(Paying for what you get)




When I first lived in Toronto I lived with a man named Reg Hartt. Reg was one of those folkloric legends that was loved as much as he was loathed. What Reg did/does is show off center films such as Metropolis or Triumph of the Will out of his house though the films were simply the bread whereas the meat was the talks Reg would give before the films or during intermissions. Technically "uneducated" he was one of the smartest people I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. There was no shortage of life lessons and learned experiences he would convey to eager audiences on any given night in the living room of his house on Bathurst Street but one of the ones that stood out and seems relevant today was one that he told about a night when he was "working the door" for a friend who was a musician and putting a show on at some venue or other. (I'm taking some liberty with the details, this story is part of a 15 year old memory) While Reg was working the door a guy came up and tried to push past without paying.

Reg said to him, "hey, there's a cover charge tonight."

The guy replied, "It's okay, I'm friends with the guy playing tonight."

Reg replied, "If you were really his friend you'd pay cover."

His point was, if it's worth having it's worth paying for. Reg is a very smart man.

Which brings me to this courier bag that I have. It's been in my possession for a long time, the better part of 13 years. I've tried other bags in between for short periods of time but have always come back to my Pac bag and the amount of abuse it's taken over the years isn't accurately depicted by it's current state. Don't get me wrong, it's worn, but it should be in tatters by now and I'm having a very difficult time coming to grips with the fact that I'm going to have to take it out behind the barn and shoot it.

I bought the Pac courier bag from Pat (the founder of Pac) at the Toronto Bike Show one year when I was a courier in Toronto. I was also going to school at the time so I didn't have a whole lot of money and the bag wasn't cheap but it looked good and Pat was really nice so I bucked up and invested. That bag got me through almost 4 years on the road as a messenger, daily commutes to school, and 9 years of commuting to work, grocery shopping, beer runs, you name it. I mean, this bag gets used for a lot and I can't make that statement sound exagerated enough to make it come close to how much I've used this bag over the years. In its life it made one trip back to the holy land (Pat's sewing workshop) for a new quick release strap and a new buckle but it hardly missed a beat and no other seams or materials needed to be dealt with.

A few years ago Pat offered to send me a free bag as a sign of appreciation for the number of bags I'd sold for her over the years in my bike stores to which I responded, in the spirit of Reg, "I need to pay you, if it's worth having it's worth paying for." But Pat was too generous and said if I sent her a few bike parts she'd call it even. The bike parts' value totalled some insignificant portion of what the bag was worth and would be long worn out and discarded while the bag would undoubtedly still be doing its job but she insisted it was fair recompense and left me no room to argue. And I was grateful, for sure, and very happy to get this shiny new bag but I kept looking at my old one in the closet and thought about how many places we'd been together, how the cordura had first softened up and then stiffened up again into a shape such that, not unlike a Brooks saddle after years of riding takes the shape of your butt, my old bag fell across my back and shoulders like a preformed security blanket. When I saw the old bag I felt like I was cheating on it with some younger, prettier bag. I couldn't do that so I passed the new bag on to a good friend of mine in need for a fair price and went back to the old faithful model. That was a couple of years ago and now it's finally time to admit I need a new bag. I hate to do it and I'm really tempted to send this one back to Pac again to work her magic but, well, the patches would have to be bigger this time and the repairs shorter lived and at some point the bag will fail (or not, it's gone this long, it may indeed be woundable but unkillable...) Writing this is therapy for me, the first step in admitting I'm about to make that phone call or compose that email and send it off to Pat asking her to work her magic and conjur me up what is likely to be the last cycling bag I ever buy. I won't ever be a bike messenger again so it's likely the break in period and early years won't be nearly as rough on this bag as it was on the first one and I'm not carrying the same dumb things I did when I was younger. Actually, check that, I'm still likely to load this bag with lots of things it wasn't designed to handle though it will probably handle it just fine each time. I'm going to get it custom made in a couple of different colours than what they come standard in though it will be black and red like the first one and the Sinclair Handmade Bicycles logo will feature proudly on the flap. It'll cost a bit more to get it made that way but if it's worth having...