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A few days ago, I went to have the tyres on my bike changed. It's taken a couple of months for me to get around to that since the winter weather definitively went away, but there's an event at work next week that I want to use the bike for, and winter tyres are not a good thing to use in the middle of June. I'm still not entirely confident in my ability to change tyres without pinching the tubes.
As I was waiting for the work to be finished, a chap came in and started asking me something about brakes in Finnish. I know just about enough Finnish to have picked out the word for "brakes" in what he was saying, and thus to realise he wasn't just making idle conversation.
Now, to be fair, I *was* hanging around the sales counter - but that's because they were just taking my bike outside to test it, and I was expecting to have to pay soon. I was also wearing very slightly smarter clothes than the actual shop staff - since they work on bikes all day, they wear stuff which can stand getting dirty, and don't have an official uniform.
So I simply replied "it's not my shop", and gestured to the real shop people who were all by the front door. A moment later some of them came back in.
As I was waiting for the work to be finished, a chap came in and started asking me something about brakes in Finnish. I know just about enough Finnish to have picked out the word for "brakes" in what he was saying, and thus to realise he wasn't just making idle conversation.
Now, to be fair, I *was* hanging around the sales counter - but that's because they were just taking my bike outside to test it, and I was expecting to have to pay soon. I was also wearing very slightly smarter clothes than the actual shop staff - since they work on bikes all day, they wear stuff which can stand getting dirty, and don't have an official uniform.
So I simply replied "it's not my shop", and gestured to the real shop people who were all by the front door. A moment later some of them came back in.