Wrangle

I work sometimes for a bike collective. We have several cargo bikes that we use for delivery jobs around the city. Bikes are stored in Greenpoint or the Upper East Side. Or at a garage in South Brooklyn. Or at someone’s house.

When someone from the collective uses a bike for work or otherwise we call the collection of the bike a ‘wrangle’.

Used in a sentence: “I wrangled Lizzie for a job in the city.” Translation: I got Lizzie out of the storage unit and I’m using it for a job in the city.”

Easy yeah?

Maybe not. Let’s say you ride your bike to the storage unit and wrangle RJ for work. After the job you don’t feel like going back to the storage unit so you ride RJ to your house. But now Jay needs RJ for a job so they ride their bike to your house to wrangle RJ. So RJ is on the job. Your bike is in the storage unit. And the only bike at your house is Jay’s bike and it’s way too tall for you. This is a dirty wrangle.

Let’s say you took the train to wrangle a bike. After work you decide to ride the bike home instead of taking the train. Tomorrow the cargo bike needs to be back at the storage unit. And you need to go to a different job which is kind of close to the storage unit but not close enough to walk from storage unit to your job. So you strap your regular bike to the platform of the cargo bike and then you put a bag of quarters on top just to make sure it’s secure. You ride to the storage unit where you drop off the cargo bike. You unstrap your bike, put the quarters in a backpack then ride to your other job. Dirty.