Bike held hostage! Any trained negotiators here?

[deptfordmarmoset]

Sue him to within an inch of his lfe

Sara him, surely!

 

[Archie_tect]

Archie is increasingly sounding like an accountant - I'm getting slightly worried for him.

Gulp, you're worried?

 

[DCLane]

£30. OK - pay it. For the sake of £30 it's not worth the hassle or the bother.

Then get yourself a decent LBS and a toolkit so it doesn't happen again.

He's an idiot and I wouldn't be worried about it. Oh, and if you can't afford the £30, PM me and I'll deliver it in 1p pieces to him ... in a big sack marked 'payment for invoice of delayed bike return'

 

[classic33]

I think you've skipped a few posts. The suggestion was that the rightful owner takes it, in the repairmans absence, then calls the repairman to say they'll be round in a few minutes to collect it. Thus denies all knowledge of having taken it and likely prompting repairman to report it stolen to cover their back/try for an insurance claim (if it had been an unknown perpetrator taking it, who's to contradict him if he said it was secured at the time without blowing their own cover - he'd prevaricated enough on returning it before, why not claim to lock it up 'by accident' to do so again) whilst at the same time the owner is now in posession of a reported stolen bike.
The ins and outs of the repair saga are irellevant at this point, the owner has forced a false crime report to occur as some sort of revenge/joke and if particularly unlucky will be seen and arrested by cops who don't know the back story and won't be impressed when they find out it was all a hoax.
happily its all hypothetical tho.

Nothing missed, see post below.

Send OH a message saying, "that as agreed OH will be picking the bike up, please have it waiting. OH will pay when collecting".
See what happens.

But by your own standards given that the bike was left outside, for anyone to take. A genuine crime report of a stolen bike would have been made, if the owner went to collect it & found that some-one else had already done so. But then, he may still have had the bike.

I simply offerred the free use of a Brox Quad for advertising purposes.