My bike has an appendix!!!

It is becoming quite difficult for me to pass one week without learning a weird new fact about this weird little world of ours. Here's one for this week! My bike was literally breathing fire after a Friday night office party as the spark plug was not only sparking inside the engine but was showing as a cool blue flame outside the engine too. Though I felt that this looked really neat ala a bike modded with nitro for illegal street racing and felt an intense urge not to have it repaired, I finally came to a conclusion that putting my pants on fire on the way to work was not the ideal way to begin what would be a really tough day anyways. Besides, there were some other niggling issues which had been bugging my bike thanks to its 1.5 years of hibernation while I was away in the USA and which were begging to be fixed.

So I handed my bike to the nearest Bajaj service centre on Saturday morning who proceeded to strip my dear Pulsar down to the very basics to my extreme concern, but thankfully managed to put it together and in the same order that they had taken it apart! Now the problems were fixed and I on my bike was back to ripping the roads & being shattered to bits by the occasional sneaky pothole. Then today as I got onto my bike and was feeling around for the fuel valve, I accidentally pulled out a pipe which seemed like it had a purpose in life before I accidentally yanked it open. Infuriated with myself at this unintended dismantling of my bike, I took to my local mechanic as the Bajaj service centres are closed on Sundays.

The guy takes just one look and says something like "Don't worry. This is a pipe which drains water out of the fuel tank if any seeps in there. Not required to fixed at all. Let it hang loose! Drive away without a fear." I was dumbfounded. When my bike went in for repairs, I kidded about it having an open heart surgery. Appears that I wasn't too far off the mark. This pipe, this unnecessary piece of rubber hosing that just chills out within my bike without being of any use is somewhat like what the appendix is to the human body. A vestigial organ from our herbivorous ancestors, the appendix kind of lies around in the intestine without helping anyone and occasionally bursting to cause some unlucky folks really extreme pain. I just found out that it is not God alone who play games with his creations adding a tube here, removing a chunk of flesh there! So do motorcycle design engineers and other like minded human beings! What next? I can't imagine. Do I find out one day that my bike did not start one morning because it was out partying with its buddies for way too long the previous night?