What was it about your bike that sold you on it?

Well, kind of a funny store on that.

My boss had gotten a bike a couple years before. He used to race motocross in his youth, but he'd gone essentially his whole adult life without owning a street bike. So he got one. And you know what happens when someone gets a motorcycle? They not only wanna ride it, but they want get people they hang out with to ride with them. At least he did. Every other day it was "Dude, you gotta get a bike" and such.

So anyway, I like bikes and I wasn't opposed, nor was I gunning for one, but that spring I started going with him to his dealership whenever he would pick up a part for his bike and I'd check them out. I discovered that I don't like most Harleys, but I really love the Custom Sportster. It's narrow, light for a Harley, has awesome retro styling, had the 1200 cc engine so it wasn't a total dog on the highway, etc. If I picked up a Harley, I was only interested in a Sportster. Every other bike they made could suck it.

So fast forward a few weeks at my job where I'm an estimator/project manager. I do a lot of public bid work, and I'm putting together a technology bid for a brand new Coast Guard facility out in Galveston, TX. It's out of state for us, and the margins on public bid work are notoriously bad, so I didn't have high hopes, but somehow I win it. Fairly decent size, about a quarter of a million dollars, so I walk into my boss's office and tell him I'm going to call up our main distributor and order a shitload of cable because I won the bid:

Boss: NO NO WAIT! Don't order from them.

Me: Why not?

Boss: Because we're ordering from [competitor].

Me: Why are we ordering from them? You told me that all major cable orders have to go through [current vendor], and that we needed to maintain our relationship with them above our second tier suppliers.

Boss: I know I said that, but we're gonna win a Harley.

Me: ...

So it turns out that a competing distributor was offering an OEM promotion where if you, at the end of Summer, were one of the top 10 purchasers of product, you received 1 of 10 keys that would start the Harley.

Me: So you are basically selling out our main distributor for what is essentially a chance to win a scratch ticket.

Boss: Yes. Exactly.

Long story shorter, that job and a couple other large ones landed us in the top 10 purchasers in the region, and we went down to the distributor's company picnic to see what we could see. Had a drawing, got picked to be first up, and it was that key that started it.

The bike I was looking at all Summer was the precise bike that was the prize, and is the bike I'm driving to this day. So the biggest thing that sold me on it was that it was free ;) but outside of that, I would have bought it for it's mix of affordability, aesthetic beauty, and performance for what I wanted it to do (cruise).