Employee Spotlight: Trevor

This is the second installment in our employee spotlight series and- if you will allow me to be entirely candid- a call out that Electric Elk is a veteran owned business so we can tweet about it for upcoming veterans day. So without further ado, please allow me to show you a picture of myself while in the Army which I think will make a nice feature image:

This is a picture of my that I'm almost sure I posed for because three day operations were not fun enough to warrant that lighthearted smile. But it really wasn't all that bad. Good experience, part of history, watching every war movie ever with fresh perspective and all that

But another question you may have, "how will he turn this back around to be about bikes? or is this just a leg-hump, look-at-me, kind of post since he has no real content?"  Well, let me answer those questions in turn:

Leg-hump / look-at-me-post? Absolutely, but you're here so it worked. 

No real content? I do have some real content- it's a lot about some custom wiring I did for lights, and a motorcycle grade dash cam and a thing I'm setting up to automate reporting to 311, and its all like 7/8ths done but this seemed fun, and hopefully the rest of that will get me through the holidays. 

How will he turn this around to be about bikes? Ah, my best trick- When I was in Afghanistan I was transferred into a Cavalry Unit, and I thought, "Oh riding horses, weird but mountainous terrain I guess (?)" and my squad leader explained to me, "the mission of the cavalry is now, and always has been to cause chaos in the flanks." That is, the mission of the cav was to be obnoxious and pester the enemy so that they would split some of their force off to go hunt you down, thus making their main body weaker, thus making it easier for our main body to win.

I've applied that mentality to several endeavors in life. And here is where I (loosely) tie being a veteran back to bikes.  So you may have heard of a podcast called the war on cars. I saw it on a sticker on a bike in the park (before I listened to the podcast), and thought, "neat idea, well then in the war on cars, I (Electric Elk) am the Heavy Cav.  

A lot to unpack there. But heavy Cavalry (instead of normal Cavalry)  because the dry curb weight of our "bikes" (read velomobiles) is about 250 pounds. And cavalry because, in the fight for safer streets, I think of normal cyclists as being the 'main body' in this analogy- out there every day, fighting the fight, reporting bike lane obstructions, slapping the roofs of cars, etc. But the Velomobiles are something else. I have slapped a few cars in my day, but not in the velomobile, you aren't close enough and you aren't catching up to anyone. You might lie on the (car) horn on the velomobile, but someone on bike yelling vs a two tone snail horn blasting from right behind you- it just hits different. 

A lot of the drivers I see are really nice and polite and waive. But really, I think most people are confused by what they're even looking at. So getting people to slow down for the novelty- great. But the real added bonus are the motor cycle grade dash cams that I'm using to report bike lane obstructions and reckless driving, those are the real kickers. The thing is a platform for employing all sorts of cool tech increase visability, and safety, and report dangerous drivers.  

So you came for the veteran and got sucked in with a bunch of mindless babble. And only one picture?! There's another one some where where we accidentally lit the HMMWV on fire and we posed these funny "How could this have happened?!" faces, but I can't find it (read, I think I know where it is tune back in next year). But I do have this one of me up in the guard tower with the Afghan Police we were mentoring, which I know was framed because I remember lining up the reflection of my sunglasses to look down the road.

So happy Veterans day, and if you're a veteran, I'll see you at Applebees later today, lol. 

Trevor aka "Doc"

Zhari, Afghanistan

2008-2009