A “Lost” bike poster that’s impossible to ignore

Opinion

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This article was published 27/07/2016 (3365 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I have a mild fascination with “Lost” posters. They are at once tenacious and desperate and hopeful. Especially the sun-bleached, rain-smeared, staple-scarred ones, the ones that say, ‘I’m hanging in, I’m holding on.’ Those posters offer little glimpses into other people’s lives. This person’s charming tuxedo cat has a sense of adventure; that person’s scruffy terrier mix is scared of loud noises. They are often, obviously, very upsetting. I’ve always thought that telling someone to “get lost” is one of the meanest things a person can say.

They are also very easy to ignore.

But, if you’re paying attention, you might stumble upon a hilarious gem. Such as Sarah Arksey’s profanity-laced plea for the return of her “sh–ty” bike — an elderly red Schwinn with a broken gear shift, a broken kickstand and a left brake held on by duct tape that was stolen from her yard in West Broadway sometime Saturday.

Most of her poster’s text is not family newspaper appropriate due to the sheer volume of F-bombs, but it is very funny — right down to the king can offered as a reward.

Arksey, 21, figures she only put up five or six of her posters. Free Press books editor/wine columnist Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson chanced upon one of them in Osborne Village, snapped a photo of it and posted it to social media.

Ben’s Facebook post now has over 3,000 shares on Facebook and over a thousand likes. That’s several thousand short of “viral,” technically, but it’s also several thousand more than five or six.

“I was not expecting this at all,” Arksey tells me. “I thought, ‘maybe I’ll do something that will catch people’s attention and make them laugh.’ If I had put ‘missing bike, call this number’ no one would have even looked at it. Which is kind of sad.”

She’s probably right about no one looking at it. Catching people’s attention and convincing them to care about things can be a tough slog, especially in an age in which we’re bombarded by information all day long.

For her part, Arksey didn’t set out to author “the best stolen bike ad ever” or a piece of highly shareable social media content. She set out to find her bike, and she did so in that most analog of ways, printing out and hanging up posters.

In the media industry, there’s always a lot of talk about “competing for eyeballs,” but many of us are competing for eyeballs in some way these days — whether we’re trying to start a new business or we’re trying to get someone to engage with a piece or art we made or we’re trying to get a red Schwinn back. A Google search for “how to stand out on social media” yields 74,300,000 results. We’re all shouting into the void and attention is fleeting. Maybe that’s why I stop to read all those “Lost” posters that have no hope of going viral, with their bad fonts and pleading earnestness. It’s a terrible feeling to think no one cares.

Arksey is happy to report that no one has abused her now widely shared cellphone number. And even though all those likes and shares haven’t led to the recovery of her bike, she says she’s had her faith in humanity restored. “For that one person that took my bike, there’s 45 who are offering me theirs. I had someone call me offering me to buy me a bike. It’s amazing.”

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @JenZoratti