I Hate Bike Tyre Pumps
Something that enrages me is when a device makes me feel like an idiot, especially when it is designed to do a very trivial task, which in this case is 'get da air into da wheel'.
I can do this on cars fine with a portable pump that plugs into the lighter socket. Plug it in, set desired PSI, attach pump to valve by twisting, press go and voila. Pump go brrr, tyre get big, great success and many smiles.
I'm not a bike person. In fact, I hate bikes, but my partner is a bike person and in fact, she likes bikes, so I've had to pick up a bit of knowledge to support her two wheeling endeavours.
She picked up a hand pump from Halfords so that she could check tyre pressure and top of the tyres. It is very similar to the one below.
I thought this would be simple, but it isn't, and it makes me want to launch it into the atmosphere. I assumed I would press it against the valve and start pumping. but it doesn't seem to do anything. I don't hear any burst of air as the valve stop is compressed to allow more air to be pumped in, the press gauge doesn't go up, I pump and nothing appears to happen..
I then realise that I'm meant to pull a latch to secure it into onto the valve. Such an idiocy, how simple the the solution was..! Nope, no difference. I thought perhaps it wasn't pressed onto the valve enough, so I pressed harder to try and get a better seal, but this only had an unforeseen consequence where the valve disappeared into the tyre. Great.
Onto Google! It turns out there are two different types of valve, who knew. Why fuck with it? Why do we need different types of valves? I've never seen a car tyre with a different sort of valve, and they're bigger. Why are bike tyres special? Why confuse people like me that don't care and don't want to learn?
YouTube next where I watched some watery-eyed lady talk about how to use bike bumps. I held the screen to speed her up to double speed and I learned that the end of the pump unscrews and allows you to remove a rubber grommet to.. well I got bored of this, supposedly the pump in my hand automatically adjusts between the two valve types so this seemed irrelevant to me.
Now I was fucked off and I threw the unused pump into a drawer, got my car keys out, removed my car tyre pump from the boot, plugged it in and pumped up both bike tyres in two minutes.
Fuck bike pumps, fuck manual labour, and fuck bikes. Just take the fucking car instead.