There's been a lot of innovations in bicycling equipment in recent years, and this has caused me a lot of confusion.
I have a stable of bicycles. I'm sort of like the Arnold Palmer of bicycling, While Arnold selects his putter, I select the bike de jour. I've got a bicycle for every conceivable situation. I've got two commuting bikes not counting the mountain bikes (three of them). Two tandems, a racing bike, a touring bike, you get the picture. I'm not exactly sure how I arrived at this happy state. Usually because of a bargain. I can't pass up a bargain, and since at any time I've got a collection of bicycle parts accumulated from sales of yore, they sort of agglommerate and form a new bicycle, not unlike the fabled Phoenix rising from its ashes.
For many years, I would cruise the Big Event for a new used bike to replace one that had been crashed or stolen. I could almost count on picking up a fairly decent used bike in the $100-200 range. I've been disappointed the last couple of times, the low price bikes were too low end even for me, and the good stuff was out of my price range.
In any event, all my bicycles are fitted with wide variety of components, ranging from the prehistoric to the nearly modern. In the area of shifters, I've mostly moved to index shifting. This used to be hot stuff, but now everyone's moved to STI and its friends. A couple of my commuting bikes have been demoted to friction mode, and of course I've got the thumb shifters on the mountain bike. So I'm never quite sure whether to expect that happy "click" or push the lever around searching for that sweet spot that will make it actually shift. Then the tandem has barend shifters, so after riding that for a couple of days, I end up clutching my naked bar ends (which are usually fitted with an old wine cork) in a futile search for a shifter. When I spring for an STI setup and then confusion will really reign supreme.
I've got a variety of aero bars, ranging from the imfamous Sark bar to myriad Profile bars, and one set of Scott drop-in handlebars. These are the ones that come all the way around and double back in so you basically lean on the end of the bar behind the regular handlebar. One of these days I'm going to hunker down of the drop-in bars when I'm riding a bike with Profiles and end up grasping air.
Pedal systems are another area of confusion. I've mostly standardized on Look pedals, but I've got toe clip and straps on my commuters still, and every once in a while I try to click out of my toeclips. Going the other direction works even worse.
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