Ruining Bikes and Feeling like S**t

I went along with some of my colleagues on a bike trip yesterday. It was from Halle to Bitterfeld, a journey of about 30 kilometres. Now, that in itself is enough to blog about, but the reason for this blog is that I, literally, ruined the bike of one of my colleagues. For the sake of anonymity I will call the colleague One.

We were a couple of kilometres from Bitterfeld when we took a wrong turn. One of the guys stopped to ask some pedestrians about the way, and One, who was in front of me turned his bike around. I, who was pretty close to him, still biking, turned back at just about the same time to see what the guy who was getting the direction was doing. The moment that One turned his bike around was the moment that I looked back. And I ran into his rear wheel. His wheel got bent in, there was no way we could fix it and he had to go to the nearest train station to go back to Halle. I don’t think that I need to add that the rest of the day was totally off for me. I had not just ruined One’s bike I had also ruined his day.

I just left One’s office and he stilled looked pretty hurt. I said I was sorry but said he could have done with that yesterday. Of course I said sorry yesterday, but maybe in the moment he didn’t hear me say it. I really feel bad that he must have gone through yesterday thinking that I didn’t feel sorry. Well, what can I do? Try to make him know that I feel sorry, and that at the point that it happened I felt sorry…. Yea, thought I would feel better after this but it is not really happening. 🙂