The bike is the easy part of this whole thing. My buddy at the local Dick’s Sports Store looked the bike over and got with the manufacturer. I get the impression this is a custom deal for this vendor, because he made it sound like some of the parts were unique to the bike. At any rate, parts alone ring up at near replacement cost for the whole bike. In tort liability terms, this means the bike is “totalled” (total loss).
I’ll get that on paper either today or Monday.
EMSA, as previously noted, is more difficult to handle. I contacted a municipal lawyer today and she didn’t seem impressed with what the EMSA folks had told me about their procedures. So she told me how they could file a claim with the City, but the City is self-insured. EMSA acts like they had never heard of such a thing. The City subsidizes EMSA, but they had no idea how to file a claim against the City’s “insurance.” You know, this strikes me as dereliction of duty. This is something that should have been in place decades ago. The City isn’t raising any roadblocks; EMSA is just being irresponsible.
At any rate, I offended the guy at EMSA, so he called the City Attorney’s Office and they got it all worked out. Why did it require that kind of poking and prodding? Because EMSA is a soulless bureaucracy. Funny how the City is so much more sensible about such things.
Why did it require that kind of poking and prodding?
Because the nature of most folks in sedentary (intellectually) jobs really don’t want to do anything more than they HAVE to out of their normal day to day tasks/routine. They are not expected to, so they fall into that lazy mode (” oh, my gosh! I have to think on my own?”) . So, can’t expect much if they aren’t encouraged by or expected to by their superiors.
Just sayin.
Yes, it’s just like good ol’ timey fire-insurance religion. First, our society is sold an overwrought image of Hell, which includes legalistic accountability for each individual mistake (which bears no resemblance at all to the God of the Bible). Second, the offered salvation is the protected enclosure of the bureaucratic hive-mind. “Be one of us and no-one can touch you.” And the bureaucracy will very much do that, but retain it’s own ambiance of fear by threatening accountability internally to keep everyone in line. They all buy into it. Nobody moves independently; everything is filtered through vast layers of bureaucratic analysis.