Confessions of a Bike Rack Installer

This post is not coming from a place of complaint or unhappiness, but as a response to the constant stream of questions I'm getting about what it is I do, because it generates a lot of confusion.  Basically, I install bike parking racks around the city.  Easy enough, right?  Not so much.  It's actually pretty challenging, and here's why:

1) Each installation, whether it's one or five "hoops," as those inverted U shaped things are referred to, requires me to visit a site, take some pictures, take some measurements, determine how to fit a bike rack in to conform with DC codes (which, believe it or not, exist, although no one but me cares about them).  Then, I go back to the office, put together a proposal, send it to the requester, wait for confirmation from whatever landlords or powers-that-be exist, and find time in my calendar to return to the site with a generator, a socket wrench set, a hammer drill, the racks, a grinder, a sledgehammer, and other sundry tools.  If the ground is made of anything other than cement, there are different tools, and if the ground is brick, I get to work with DDOT crews who have to drill out the hole with a rock hammer.  At present, I have a backlog of over 50 places that want at least one bike rack.  Many of them want or need more.  There is one of me.  One of me, 50+ of them.  The District Department of Transportation, lovely folks that they are, only allots funds for me to work 32 hours a week. 

2) Very few people out there know what the non-profit organization I work for is.  When they ask me who I work for, I tell them. Usually, they respond with, "There's a whole organization that supports bikes?  What do they do???" Which is pretty exciting, because I get to tell them all about all of those wonderful things.  Unfortunately, the curious passersby are usually asking me this when I'm lugging around hundreds of pounds worth of stuff, in a set up kind of like this:

Or when I'm in the process of trying to drill some holes in the ground with a hammer drill OR when I'm trying to bang things into those holes with a sledgehammer.  If I tell them I work for DDOT, they generally say, "Oh," and walk away.  So sometimes I do that.

3) When people ask what I do my response inevitably produces a raised eyebrow, a visual up-down of my rather small frame, or both.  PARTICULARLY from men.  Whether or not they mean to be, this is incredibly insulting, and incredibly frustrating, especially when it happens on the job.  Just the other day, I was trying to install some racks outside of USDOT while the building supervisor (a male in a suit) stood by to make sure security didn't pitch a fit over this strange girl with her power tools.  I heard the following comments from two of his colleagues:

• "It's a man's world when the woman's doing all the construction and the man gets to stand there and watch her while wearing a suit."
• "They sure are putting your pretty little arms to work, aren't they?"

In response, I said nothing to the first, and threw out, "Well, I don't know that I'd use the adjective 'pretty'", to the second, which wasn't terribly clever or biting, but it shut him up.  I messed up the installation, due in no small part to the fact that I was getting angry and also very nervous under the judgmental eyes of several men standing around watching me and making comments.  Which made me feel stupid, because I really DO know what I'm doing. Anyway, it ruined my entire day and it's making me mad just thinking about it now.

4) Unfortunately, the learning curve for this job is fairly steep and largely based in trial and error.  My predecessor did a great job of training me, but of the several installations I've done so far, a few have been unavoidable screw-ups.  Sometimes this is due to nervousness, as in my last example, but sometimes it's because the ground isn't quite steady, or the pavement cracks from the drill bit, or there's actually sand where there's supposed to be concrete, or the fasteners that I have are the wrong kind and won't secure the rack in the ground....there's a rather large spectrum of things that can go wrong that I have very little control over.  Because I am something of a perfectionist, I don't like this.  At all.  It makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong, and because I'm only a couple of weeks in, it's going to take awhile to get past that.

5) The work is straight-up draining.  There's the mental strain of trying to organize installations, and then there's the physical strain of actually doing them.  I repeat: I am a perfectionist, so trying to juggle this and being a full-time student (remember, I can only work 32 hours a week!) is, well, taxing.  

At the end of the day, I 100% love what I do.  When things go right, I have the ability to make people really, really happy.  Just yesterday, I visited an elementary school waaaaaaay out in Southeast, and the woman I was working with kept excitedly introducing me to people, saying, "This is Rachel.  She works with Department of Transportation, and she's going to give us some bike racks!!"  Each rack I install is one tiny bit closer to making DC a more bike-friendly city, and there's nothing like walking by a place of business and seeing a bike chained to something that YOU installed.  I also enjoy knocking down a few gender norms and stereotypes along the way, although that's a part of it I wish I didn't have to deal with sometimes.  Frankly though, it's all worth it!