I Don't Need Any Fucking Help Shopping

I was doing some internet shopping this morning, because hey, that's what I fucking do sometimes. I make good money, but I have expensive habits, so naturally, I spend good fucking money, too. Motorcycles are expensive. That's a fucking fact. And if you're the kind of person who actually rides the motherfuckers instead of keeping them polished in the garage for the occasional sunny Sunday afternoon, they're even more expensive. Tires, oil, maintenance, accessories, replacement parts, and all the other shit that goes along with putting tens of thousands of miles on a motorcycle every year. It adds up. And I wouldn't trade it for a fucking thing.

But sometimes, I get a little tired of spending good money on shit that doesn't last.

Last October, I had an email exchange with the customer service folks at Le Pera, a company that makes aftermarket motorcycle seats. I'd purchased one of their Daddy Long Legs seats about seven months earlier for Lilith, my 2022 Harley-Davidson Road King Special. And I fucking loved that seat. Not because it was particularly pretty, although it looked good on the bike, but because it actually fit my body. I'm six-foot-one with a thirty-five-inch inseam. I have long fucking legs, and most motorcycle seats seem to be designed for people whose knees are considerably closer to their asses than mine are.

The Daddy Long Legs seat moved me back far enough that I could stretch out a little. My knees weren't jammed up around my ears, my hips weren't folded into some unnatural position, and I could spend an entire day riding without feeling like I'd been stuffed into a fucking suitcase. It was glorious.

Unfortunately, after about twenty thousand miles, the fucking thing was falling apart.

Now, twenty thousand miles might sound like a lot to somebody who rides three thousand miles a year. To me, that's a few months of doing what I bought the fucking motorcycle to do. Ride it. I didn't purchase a six-hundred-dollar motorcycle seat to display it in my living room. I purchased it to put my ass on it and go places. Lots of places. Preferably far away, and preferably at a pace that makes the miles disappear faster than my bank balance.

So I wrote Le Pera and asked why my expensive fucking seat was deteriorating after less than a year.

And they wrote back.

And, in the finest tradition of customer service, they explained that it was my fucking fault.

See, I'd mentioned in my email that I maintained the seat with leather conditioner. Because I thought I was buying a premium motorcycle seat, and apparently I was foolish enough to assume that six or seven hundred dollars might get me something made out of actual fucking leather. Silly me.

Nope. Vinyl.

They explained that leather conditioner could damage vinyl, causing cracking and discoloration, and that I should have been cleaning the seat with mild soap and water. And you know what? I believed them. I had told them what product I was using, they explained why it was inappropriate, and I accepted their explanation. I'm perfectly capable of admitting when I've fucked something up. I do it all the time. Ask Dawna.

I did point out that for the price they charge for these motherfuckers, actual leather might not be an unreasonable expectation. But after a little back and forth, Le Pera offered to recover the seat at no charge if I paid to ship it to them.

And I thought that was pretty fucking stand-up customer service.

That was October 24, 2025.

Three days later, a car hit me in Santa Fe and totaled Lilith.

You might have heard me whine about that particular little inconvenience before. Broken bones, surgeries, months of rehabilitation, a motorcycle destroyed, and a rather abrupt reminder that life can change in the time it takes somebody to make one really fucking stupid decision behind the wheel.

Naturally, shipping my motorcycle seat back to California dropped pretty far down my list of priorities. Somewhere below learning to walk again and figuring out how to drink coffee without wearing half of it.

But in December, once I'd managed to put a little distance between myself and the worst of that nightmare, I wrote Le Pera again. I thanked them for offering to stand behind their product, explained that Lilith was gone, and told them I wouldn't be sending the seat back. I also promised that when I replaced the motorcycle, I'd buy another one of their seats.

And I meant it.

Eventually, Nyx entered my life. My Harley-Davidson Road Glide. My replacement road bike, my traveling companion, and the machine that helped put a whole lot of the joy back into my life after the accident.

And I kept my fucking word.

In January, I ordered another Le Pera seat. This time, a Maverick Daddy Long Legs.

Seven hundred and nine fucking dollars.

And once again, the positioning was great. I had my legroom back. I could ride for hours without feeling like my knees were being used to hold my fucking chin up. I was happy with the purchase.

Until yesterday.

Dawna and I were at a gathering, and she happened to notice something on the seat. The seams were coming apart.

Not cracking vinyl. Not discoloration. Not damage from some supposedly inappropriate cleaning product.

The fucking seams were splitting.

And guess how many miles I've put on Nyx?

About twenty thousand.

Well, isn't that a fascinating fucking coincidence?

Two Le Pera seats. Two different motorcycles. Two purchases roughly ten months apart. Two failures at approximately twenty thousand miles.

Now, I'm not a statistician, and two data points aren't enough to establish some grand scientific conclusion about an entire company's manufacturing process. But they're more than enough to establish a conclusion about what I'm willing to spend my own fucking money on.

And that conclusion is pretty simple: I'm done buying Le Pera seats.

I sent them an email explaining exactly why. I told them that I'd trusted their explanation the first time, appreciated their offer to recover the seat, and rewarded that experience by spending another seven hundred dollars on their product. And now I have another expensive seat coming apart after roughly the same mileage.

At some point, you stop giving people the benefit of the doubt and start paying attention to the fucking pattern.

And I'm paying attention.

Now, Dawna has a great idea for what we might do with the current seat, but that's going to take some time. I'm not going to get into all the details just yet, because we still have to figure out exactly how we're going to pull it off. And when I say we, I should probably clarify that there's not going to be a whole lot of me involved in the actual work.

I have many talents.

Upholstery isn't one of them.

There are certain things in life that I know better than to attempt, and taking apart a motorcycle seat and trying to make it look like something other than a wounded fucking couch cushion is pretty high on that list. Dawna, on the other hand, has the patience, the creativity, and the ability to look at something broken and see what it could become.

So I'll be leaning on her for that one.

But in the meantime, I need a seat.

And before somebody suggests that I just put the factory seat back on, let me explain something.

I have a thirty-five-inch fucking inseam.

Thirty. Five. Inches.

My legs are long. My arms are long. I'm built like somebody took a perfectly normal-sized woman and stretched her out on a medieval torture rack. Most factory motorcycle seats are designed around riders with considerably shorter legs, and when I sit on one, my knees end up folded into positions that would make a yoga instructor wince.

I don't want to ride across New Mexico with my kneecaps jammed into my fucking rib cage.

I want legroom.

I want a seat that puts me up and back on the frame, opens up the space between my hips and the footboards, and lets me ride the way I like to ride. Which is a lot. For hours. Across states. Sometimes across several of the motherfuckers.

And yes, it needs to accommodate a passenger, because Dawna rides with me sometimes. I love that woman more than I can adequately explain, but she's a dainty little thing, and she's not spending twenty thousand miles a year on the back of Nyx. So while I absolutely want her to be comfortable, the person who's putting in the overwhelming majority of the saddle time gets first consideration.

That would be me.

Which brings us back to this morning.

There I was, sitting at my Microsoft Surface, shopping for a replacement motorcycle seat. I'd been looking at different manufacturers, comparing seat dimensions, reading about extended-reach designs, and trying to find something that would give me the same riding position without requiring me to replace the fucking thing every twenty thousand miles.

A perfectly ordinary Saturday morning.

Well, ordinary for me, anyway.

And because I'm using a Microsoft Surface, naturally I'm running Microsoft Windows. And because I'm running Windows, I'm using Microsoft Edge. And because apparently Microsoft has decided that no human being should ever be allowed to accomplish a simple fucking task without an artificial intelligence assistant sticking its nose into the proceedings, Microsoft Copilot decided to make an appearance.

Looks like you're shopping!

Oh, for fuck's sake.

Yes, Copilot. I'm shopping.

Congratulations on your remarkable powers of observation.

I'm sitting here looking at motorcycle seats, opening product pages, comparing prices, and reading specifications. Somehow, through a dazzling display of computational brilliance, you've managed to deduce that I might be shopping.

What's next? Are you going to notice that I'm typing when my fingers start moving across the fucking keyboard?

I have written about Microsoft's increasingly obnoxious attempts to insert Copilot into every conceivable corner of my digital life before. I've compared the damn thing to Clippy, that irritating little animated paperclip that used to pop up in Microsoft Office and offer unsolicited assistance every time somebody tried to write a fucking letter.

Apparently, Microsoft learned absolutely nothing from that experience.

We finally got rid of Clippy, and now they've given him a large language model and permission to follow us around the internet.

Wonderful.

And the thing that really gets me is the assumption behind all this supposedly helpful technology. The assumption that because I'm doing something on a computer, I must want a computer to help me do it.

I don't.

I know how to fucking shop online.

I've been doing it for years.

I'm actually pretty goddamned good at it.

If you don't believe me, ask my wife.

Dawna is the one who gets to deal with the steady parade of cardboard boxes, padded envelopes, and mysterious packages that materialize at our front door. Motorcycle parts, riding gear, tools, gadgets, and whatever other shiny object managed to catch my attention while I was supposed to be doing something productive.

She can absolutely confirm that I do not require additional assistance finding things to spend money on.

In fact, if you asked her whether Kate needs help shopping online, I suspect she'd laugh.

Then she'd probably tell you that the last fucking thing I need is another piece of technology encouraging me to buy shit.

And she might have a point.

A small one.

A very small one.

Whatever.

The point is that I don't need an artificial intelligence assistant hovering over my shoulder every time I open a website. I don't need a digital paperclip offering to compare prices for me when I haven't asked it to. I don't need Microsoft trying to anticipate my every desire, insert itself into every task, and turn every mundane interaction with my computer into some kind of collaborative experience.

Sometimes I just want to use the fucking computer.

I want to open a browser, search for a product, read the specifications, make a decision, and buy the damn thing.

That's it.

I don't need a conversation about it.

I don't need suggestions.

I don't need encouragement.

And I sure as fuck don't need Clippy's overeducated grandson popping up to announce that he's noticed I'm shopping.

If I want help, I'll ask for it. I'm not shy about asking questions when I need an answer. I use technology constantly, including artificial intelligence, and I appreciate what it can do when I actually want it to do something.

But there's a difference between a tool that's available when I need it and a tool that keeps inserting itself into my life because somebody at Microsoft decided that more artificial intelligence must automatically mean a better fucking experience.

It doesn't.

Sometimes better means getting the fuck out of the way.

So, after spending my morning comparing options, I've decided to give a Drag Specialties seat a try. It'll get me back on the road while Dawna and I figure out what to do with the Le Pera seat. Maybe it'll be comfortable. Maybe it'll last. Maybe I'll discover that I've finally found something that fits my ridiculous fucking legs without disintegrating under my ass.

We'll see.

I'm willing to try something new. I'm willing to spend money on a product that solves a problem. And I'm perfectly willing to admit when something I bought doesn't work out.

What I'm not willing to do is keep buying the same expensive product after it has disappointed me twice.

And what I absolutely don't need is Microsoft Copilot congratulating itself for noticing that I'm trying to buy another one.

I need a motorcycle seat.

I need thirty-five inches of inseam accommodated.

I need something that won't start falling apart after twenty thousand fucking miles.

And I need my computer to let me shop for it in peace.

Because if there's one thing in this world that Kate Sjostrand does not need help doing, it's spending money on motorcycles.

Just ask my wife.

She'll fucking tell you.