The OCC Bike unveiling

Yesterday was the unveiling of the HP themed OCC bike in Fort Collins. I braved the cool morning temperatures and rode my motorcycle in to park in the special motorcycle parking section they set up for the event. With my 6AM arrival (I'm trying to keep on an early to bed early to rise schedule after my trip), I was the first bike there. Later in the afternoon, I walked over to the lot to see how many bikes had shown up. As I was heading over there, we ran into Paul Sr. being taken to the courtyard to scout the location. The rest of the OCC gang was hanging out in one of the conference rooms.

At around 1:30 the crowd started gathering in the courtyard for the 2PM taping. I grabbed a spot along the walkway that the bike would be coming in on. At 2, some of our executives got up on the stage and started talking things up and filling time. They had a lot of time to fill because there was a problem getting the bike to start. (I heard Jr. taping some segments for the show later and he said there was a problem with the fuel line.) The time filling was extremely not interesting, but I have to admit it was amusing to see our executives stammering up there, totally eating it. We had several high level people here, and they're usually not short on words.

Finally we heard the roar of the bike, and Paul Sr. rode down the walkway and over to the stage. There was a little ramp on the stage, and he actually nearly dumped the bike off the ramp! I really hope they show that on TV because I didn't get a good view of what happened. He was pretty out of breath when he took to the mic on the stage. I don't know if it was from the altitude or the adrenaline of nearly dropping and really expensive custom chopper.



The bike is pretty cool, but I bet not so friendly on the butt for riding as it's completely rigid. They made some cool custom wheels for it and they integrated an HP GPS gadget into the top of the gas tank. The bike is on display in our cafeteria (under 24 hour guard) until Wednesday. If any of you want to come up to Fort Collins and check it out, I can get you in.





Okay, that's enough of the recap. Now let me bitch and snark a bit. The email we received about the event very clearly said "This event is for HP employees only because of space limitations - no friends or family will be admitted." There should have been an addition: "...Unless you're an executive. In which case you can bring your whole family and let them sit on the bike." And it's quite funny to watch the money makers and their wives try to sit on a chopper when they're very clearly not comfortable on a motorcycle. They just sat there awkwardly on the bike and wouldn't even lean the bike off the stand. I completely understand and agree with the idea of making it an HP only event, but if you're going to make that rule and then blatantly break it, at least try to be a little discrete about it.