Not so much about the job, this one, more just about the internet, our medium rather than our message.  It isn’t either profound or insightful, indeed I am ten years on the uptake, but sometimes something just happens which makes a point particularly well.  Who knows, the practical information I will, rather incidentally, pass on might also even change your life.

The story begins with a boy and a new bike.  Boy takes bike out for first time, falls off, breaks brake lever, becomes distraught.  Boy’s father thus called upon to act as emergency bicycle repair man in emotionally heightened atmosphere.  All seems clear enough, but a seemingly insuperable obstacle is encountered: how to get the bike handgrips off (without destroying them), so that everything else can get off and get put back on.  In my day, (for, yes, the father I am he) bike handgrips were either sticky tape for the pros or fairly rigid plasticky things for kids which just slid off – often so easily that they would slide off disconcertingly when you were riding.  I hadn’t really thought about it much since, but upon examination modern handgrips are soft, tactile and rubbery and seem fused with the handlebar within, a maddening obstacle to the business in hand.  They simply don’t budge a millimetre.  Cut to next scene: father trying to suppress excessively open expressions of extreme frustration while boy looks on asking: “are you going to fix it soon?”

Enter the trusty MacBook.  Who knows?  Maybe a google search on “how to remove bicycle handgrips” will produce a miracle cure… Naturally hundreds of search results, but it is obvious that I am on potentially fertile terrain, with all manner of bicycle maintenance websites appearing.  However, most suggest squirting compressed air under the handgrips.  Yeah, as if I’ve got a fully equipped bicycle repair workshop in my Brussels house.  Then, bizarrely, some guy somewhere in darkest Wisconsin or the like brings up the surprising qualities of hairspray.  Sure…  There are some strange folk out there, it seems.

But no, onward search reveals other bike web-people extolling the virtues of hairspray.  It lubricates when wet but sticks when dry.  Just get a screwdriver under the handgrip, squirt in a little hairspray and Bob’s your uncle. Reverse the process to put it back on.  Guess what? It works like a dream!  It is astounding, miraculous, the bike was fixed in no time and the father was a beaming hero to his son, which is how it should be.

But imagine this before the internet.  How would I EVER have discovered a trick like that – knowledge possessed by a baseball cap wearing resident of the small-town American Midwest?  It’s truly mind-blowing.  It made me think that the internet really is what those slightly weird nerdy-academic types claim: the third great information revolution in human history, after the invention of writing and then of printing, a transformation in how information can reach the place it is needed.  Information need only exist in one place – even in darkest Wisconsin – and anyone, even a frustrated Brussels would-be bicycle repair man, can simply go and get it.  

Of course, that’s old hat now, and we’re all supposed to be excited about Web 2.0 or the semantic web or whatever, but for me right now it is hairspray and handgrips which best sum up the miracle of the internet.

Watch a video revealing this secret (I found this later – this time a guy in Winfield, Illinois, gratifyingly actually wearing my imagined baseball cap) right here and see it work before your eyes!