My last Cowboy e-bike test-ride

It was the best of rides, it was the worst of rides.

Cowboy e-bikes out of Belgium are a pretty cool company. They found me via a freelancer platform when I was in my 3rd year of unemployment and offered me a chance to help sell e-bikes and maybe help the world a little.

The bikes are super cool, most people agree. Very simple, sleek, the “iPhone of e-bikes” they say. You just jump on it and ride like Ironman, you’re suddenly twice as strong as you usually are. No gears, just pedal and go. For most of my rides I’m going an average of 30kph, which means I’m doing most of the work since one gets less support after 25kph. Wow that process has gotten much smoother since I started doing test rides in April 2022 - I remember it being like hitting a wall at 25kph and then an update automatically downloaded itself into the bike and then it was unnoticeably smooth.

Hey why not sell the bike? It’s low maintainance, easy to clean, a carbon belt instead of a chain so there’s no oil to be messing with, nice fat tires for city riding, automatic updates, pretty soon the most important feature on the bike is the bell…

”passing, have a good day…”
”passing, have a good day…”

Yeah so the bikes sell themselves. By my own tracking, it seems like half of my test rides were followed by a sale, and many of those were people replacing their car with an e-bike… Awesome! That was really my motivation. Plus, working mainly as a programmer out of my home office, it was good to get out and meet interesting people. So many interesting people!

My underemployment came to a slow end between being engaged by Cowboy and finally receiving the bike. (how exciting! the biggest box you’ll ever receive!). There were big problems with delivery back then, so it took about 6 months. (now it’s generally 2 weeks or so). I was hired by a startup to be their solo full-stack programmer. Doing the math now, I might have earned more focussing on selling e-bikes than I did working at the startup but hey, coding has more of a future eh?

And so it was: my time was pretty flexible with the first startup, but when I was hired by another company I found I only had time to do test rides between 0700 and 0900. I still got some rides! But family and work and a surprise 0830 appointment to test ride a bike on the other side of town got to be a bit of a drag… I would get appointments automatically sent to me via a cloud calendar, usually a day to a week in advance.

This last ride was a week in advance. I was surprised because, hey, it’s freaking January and there’s ice everywhere but whatever. I thought, nice, an intense ride to be my last ride, bonus if it’s a sale.

My various navigation apps told me it should take around 25 minutes to get to the appointment. But my morning was a bit disrupted… I would normally leave another 10 minutes earlier but it didn’t work out. The client called me as I was about to leave to tell me not to ring the bell but just to text her, and she called me again as I was on the way - I was a bit late between weather and traffic, so it was good to have so much communication - and to think my biggest worry was that she might be a no-show!

The test ride itself was a bit rushed but joyful. It’s really nice to let someone ride the bike and see the big smile when they ride around on it. Mission accomplished, joy shared!

The ride back to my home office was so slow. Something about riding through the middle of Berlin confuses the heck out of my phone’s navigation apps and I don’t know the best ways around myself. Once I got to the Panke river, I just sorta relaxed and followed it home - no traffic, just people and dogs and a snowy path.

The ride back was a bit too slow. Sooooo cold! I kept pulling my hood up over my hat to stop my brain from freezing, then pulling it down again to check for traffic, all the while struggling to stop my hat from covering my eyes, aaaaugghhh! Though my gear wasn’t too bad, by the time I got home I couldn’t feel my fingers or my toes.

Stowed the bike, ran up the stairs, took off my winter gear and looked at the clock - oh no! 10am! Jumped into my video standup meeting with my glasses still dark from having been in the sun. Mission really accomplished: Test ride completed, Standup attended, and calendar blocked for the rest of the year along with a request for off-boarding.

It’s time to accept that I have no time for this anymore.
But! It was a great experience and I recommend it to anyone!

Will I keep the bike now? Will I learn the banjo? Will I make a Riffi video? Will I complete my online course?
What is it that you would stop to get a little more bandwidth for other things in your life? Or maybe you have extra time, what crazy options do you have for spending it?