bike messenging

hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
and im pretty good at it. im not a racer but in good shape. i do follow the
traffic laws (unlike most messengers ive seen). are there some services in
the seattle area that are better than others? years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?
-alan

In article ,
"greggery peccary" .@. writes:

hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am thinking making work out of something that
normally is enjoyable can be a fun-killer.

years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?

Probably not. IME dispatchers are mercurial sadists.
But I've never been a cycle courier; maybe they have
a different breed of dispatcher. Out of love for
humanity, I hope so.


cheers,
Tom

--
-- Nothing is safe from me.
Above address is just a spam midden.
I'm really at: tkeats [curlicue] vcn [point] bc [point] ca

"Tom Keats" wrote in message
...
In article ,
"greggery peccary" .@. writes:

hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these
jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding
downtown
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

I am thinking making work out of something that
normally is enjoyable can be a fun-killer.


good point...or maybe i'll just not think of it as work! oh sh*t im already
fired!

"greggery peccary" .@. wrote in message
...
hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these
jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
and im pretty good at it. im not a racer but in good shape. i do follow
the
traffic laws (unlike most messengers ive seen). are there some services in
the seattle area that are better than others? years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?
-alan



Alan, what is a "super shuttle" driver? I'm curious.

And, if you get the messenger job, please post all about it. I am
interested. Since I live in a relatively rural area, bicycle messenger
won't work. But, I see them when I visit NY.

How does it work? Do you get connected to a dispatch system? How do you
get paid? How much does the dispatch system get?

Can you be your own dispatch and messenger together?

Tell me all about it.

Thanks.... Thomas

: Alan, what is a "super shuttle" driver? I'm curious.

I took a Super Shuttle home from DFW a week ago. It's a long van that
operates like a taxi to haul more people than a taxi can. We had 8 people in
ours, all going to different directions and the driver used a GPS to figure
out which way to go first. The driver took everyone to their front doors.
It cost me $18.

Pat in TX

"greggery peccary" .@. wrote in message
...
hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these
jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
and im pretty good at it. im not a racer but in good shape. i do follow
the
traffic laws (unlike most messengers ive seen). are there some services in
the seattle area that are better than others? years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?
-alan


======
Alan, I found this on the web; thought it was pretty well written.

Hermes
by Eli Sanders

LET'S PROPOSE a theory. Nothing too new or radical -- it is the weekend,
after all. Let's just say there are really only two ways of looking at
things in this world: from within, and from without. And now that we're done
with that, let's talk about bike messengers.

In case you haven't been in the urban core of any major American city for
the past few decades, bike messengers are those toned, tattooed daredevils
who cut through exhaust and traffic all day long delivering just about
anything that will fit in their shoulder bags: legal documents, settlement
checks, X-rays, tax filings, architectural plans, silver flatware the judge
has said must now be passed from the lawyers for him to the lawyers for her.

Who are these people, these men and women who spend their days pedaling
inches away from the grills of trucks, swerving around shocked pedestrians
and standing, sweaty and smelly and proud of it, in high-rise elevators?

This would seem an important question to be asking, considering that next
month, scores of messengers from around the world are going to descend on
Seattle for the Cycle Messenger World Championships, an Olympics-style
bike-courier competition. The contests will include sprinting, curb-hopping,
cargo-pulling and skidding.

But it turns out that when it comes to bike messengers, "Who are these
people?" is actually not the most important question to be asking. Remember
the theory. The most important question is: Who are you, and where are you
looking from?

PERHAPS YOU ARE looking down from the driver's seat of your big, green Chevy
Suburban, as was a rather angry man who, while I was working as a bike
messenger in downtown Seattle last summer, pulled up alongside me at a stop
light and for no apparent reason began yelling: "I hate you messengers!"

Perhaps you are looking out from television sets across the city, as was Ken
Schram, the local pundit who last summer went on air and fulminated against
"these cycle-nazis" who "zip inside two lanes of traffic, run red lights and
stop signs, make illegal turns or terrorize pedestrians on the sidewalk."

Or perhaps you are not someone with so loud a voice or so wide an audience.
Perhaps you are simply someone who has been frightened by a zooming
messenger while walking around downtown, or cut off by a messenger while
driving, or flipped off by a messenger, or worse. Perhaps you are a
pedestrian who has wound up flat on the sidewalk, staring at a haze of bike
shoes and piercings and attitude after being hit by a messenger (this does
happen, though no firm statistics exist on how often).

You see where we are going. We are now looking at messengers from the
outside, from the perspective that many seem to have, the perspective that
says messengers are, as Schram put it, "hazardous and menacing."

There is, of course, another way to look at messengers. From within -- from
behind their handlebars, from atop their pedals, the way I looked at
messengers last summer.

From June through September, I worked for the largest Seattle messenger
company, ABC Legal. I earned $9 an hour, the starting salary but also not
far from as good as the pay gets. I received no health benefits. (According
to one of my managers, ABC is one of just two companies downtown that offer
some health benefits, but at ABC you have to work a year before you get
them.) I rode the hills, delivered the packages, raced to the courthouse to
file the last-minute legal papers. I was 24, ready for a break from a
writing job, and hearing plenty of advice that I was making a huge mistake.
It turned out to be the best summer job I ever had.

For its brooding workforce of artists, anarchists, office refugees and other
assorted misfits, messengering offers the perfect antidepressant cocktail: a
daily dose of endorphins, regular booster shots of adrenaline and fresh air,
plus a new mission every 15 minutes. The sense of accomplishment is
continual. The highs -- from caffeine, from the sugar in those little
candies at receptionists' desks, from illicit substances that some
messengers partake in -- are perpetual. And the deliveries are stamped
"SPECIAL," a fact that seeps into your mind after a while.

Jeremy, a muscular 23-year-old whose name among messengers has evolved into
a simple growl -- "Grrr" -- once externalized this seepage by stamping the
word SPECIAL all over his body. He explains the job's allu

"There's not really that much at this age that would be better . . . I've
worked office jobs before, and I know how much an office job can suck.
You're basically just sitting doing mundane stuff all day under fluorescent
lights. That basically drains your whole will.

Over the summer, I got to know Grrr and the other "cycle-nazis," people
mostly in their 20s who naturally see themselves a bit differently than the
outside world does. About 100 messengers rove downtown Seattle for about a
dozen companies, and the ones I met saw themselves, first of all, as
blue-collar workers doing a physically demanding and dangerous job. They
believe in messengering the way lawyers or doctors believe in the excellence
of their occupations.

Their reasons vary. Some just love bikes and thrill at the chance to get
paid to ride them all day. Others see the trade as the perfect
anti-corporate, anti-establishment hideout. (Welcome to the first of many
paradoxes in the bike-messenger business: The very existence of this
anti-corporate, anti-establishment hideout depends upon the existence of
corporations and establishments that are sending messages.) Still other
messengers see their work as an in-your-face reminder to the SUV-driving and
car-commuting crowd that there is a more eco-friendly way to get around.
Finally, many messengers believe in their job simply because it is the
perfect way to earn a little cash and get in shape without stressing
yourself so much that you can't think about what's really important, which
of course is your band or your art (the overlap between bike messengers and
band members is considerable).

But if messengers differ as to why they believe in what they do, they tend
to agree that their self-image is defined by the hostility they often feel
from the world in which they operate.

A few minutes after that man in the green Suburban yelled at me, I crossed
paths with Grrr, whom I looked to as something of a mentor. When I told him
what had happened, he said, "You gotta get used to it. People don't like
us."

SO WE NOW HAVE two visions of the bike messenger. Looking in from without,
we see reckless miscreants. Looking out from within, we see earnest athletes
trying to do a tough job in a hostile environment. It is, of course, not
that simple.

There is seeing from within, and there is seeing from without. But there is
also this: Two reasonable people can stand on the same outside, look into
the same inside, and see totally different things.

There is the guy in the green Suburban, an outsider who is obviously not a
messenger fan.

Then there are the outsiders like the lawyer in a gray button-down shirt I
found myself standing next to at a urinal in a downtown office tower.

"Nice day," he said. "Better than all those gloomy winter days, huh?"

I agreed, said something about not looking forward to the rainy season.

"But you guys are pretty bullet-proof, aren't you?" he said back, shooting
me a look that I took to be the highest form of admiration one man can
safely express for another in a bathroom.

Yes, I nodded, we are bullet-proof.

And then there is Jack Dennerlein, an outsider who also happens to be a
professor of ergonomics and safety at the Harvard School of Public Health.
Dennerlein always admired messengers. "I have to admit that that's why I
studied them," he says.

Last year Dennerlein and another Harvard researcher, John Meeker, released
the results of their study of occupational injuries among 113 bike
messengers in Boston. No similar study has been done here, and the
Washington Department of Labor and Industries doesn't have good data on
injuries reported specifically by bike couriers.

But the size of Boston and its messenger community is roughly comparable to
Seattle. The study there found high rates of injuries -- greater than rates
for the meat-packing industry. And anecdotal evidence in Seattle suggests
high rates of injury here, too.

"Everyone's time comes," a local rider named Brent told me with typical
fatalism. "I've got scars all over me from being hit."

Last summer I saw a downtown biker dazed and bleeding after having gone
through the back window of a car. I heard horror stories of being pinned
between Metro buses, saw legs gouged by pedals, noticed the regular
occurrence of casts, bandages and limps. I heard about the messenger who, in
June 2000, was killed by a motorist.

In this environment, "wrecking" is almost a rite of passage. One of the
times I felt most embraced by the messengers was when I showed up for work
on a Monday sporting bruises and road rash from having crashed during a
weekend ride. Joe, a dashing messenger with so little body fat his veins
look like snakes slithering beneath his skin, came over to take a look at
the hard crust forming over my scrapes. "Yeah, scabbers!" he said, smiling
warmly.

The Boston study painted a profile of the city's courier class: The average
age of those surveyed was 27, and most were men. They averaged 28 deliveries
a day. Ninety percent said they had been injured on the job at some point.
The most common cause of injury was collision with a motor vehicle; the
least common was collision with a pedestrian.

Given the numbers, one surprising finding was that only 24 percent of the
Boston messengers wore helmets. In Seattle, only some messenger companies
require helmets, and many messengers ride without them. Yet most of the
Boston messengers surveyed, and many in Seattle, say their job is quite
risky. Another paradox.

The findings on helmet use seem to support the idea that bike messengers
tend to be risk-takers -- or, if you are feeling less charitable, idiots.
Trouble is, the study didn't assess who was at fault in the accidents or who
else was injured. So the data can be used to support either the view that
messengers are reckless or that they are victims of a hostile environment.

DENNERLEIN WAS aware of the different ways messengers are seen, but he tried
to take an objective look. Perhaps their aggressive on-the-road behavior was
a sort of Darwinian adaptation.

"The messengers have created a survival mechanism to live on the streets,"
he says. "Bicyclists are sort of locked between a rock and a hard place.
They can't be on the sidewalks -- they're not pedestrians -- but they're not
cars, either, and there's no room for them on the road."

And he saw their existence as an essential urban phenomenon.

"My view of them is that they're part of our working community," he says.
"They're providing a service to the businesses of our downtown environment,
and it's a service that's come about by way of necessity."

Imagine what would happen, Dennerlein says, if the thousands of deliveries
bike messengers make each day had to be carried by car or foot. Traffic
congestion would increase, delivery times would slow, the pace of commerce
would slacken and the air would become more polluted. (In unpublished data,
Dennerlein and Meeker concluded that in the year 2000, the fact that
Boston's couriers delivered messages by bike instead of by light truck saved
16.2 tons of carbon monoxide.)

In downtown Seattle, you have only to look at one aspect of the bike
messenger's job -- legal deliveries -- to see how indispensable messengers
are. About 5,500 lawyers do business there, and they rely heavily on
messengers to accomplish the essential errands that keep due process from
becoming overdue: filing court papers, serving subpoenas, pulling case
files, passing Mariners tickets to clients, ferrying that contested silver
flatware across town.

At the King County Courthouse, the largest downtown judicial center,
messengers are constantly rushing through the metal detectors. This
courthouse handles about 300 filings a day, and while there is no way to
tell how many of those are done by messengers, hang out in the clerk's
office just before the noon and 4:30 p.m. filing deadlines and it becomes
clear who's doing the heavy lifting. The frantic click, click, click you
hear on the marble floors is not from high-powered lawyer heels. It is from
messengers' bike shoes dashing for the finish. The odor you smell is not
fancy cologne; it is unadulterated biker funk.

In this sense, the entire apparatus of civil law and order in Seattle is
supported by a bunch of scofflaws who run red lights and go the wrong way
down one-way streets and scare the heck out of little old ladies, all to
please the court. Welcome to yet another paradox.

"They're paid to get somewhere quickly," says Dennerlein, "but that pay is
an incentive to break the law."

This paradox seems to have been with messengers since the beginning. The
Greek god Hermes, the archetypal messenger who wore winged shoes, was the
son of Zeus and presided over commerce. To the Greeks, messengers and their
speed were indispensable to trade. Yet even in that time, it seems
messengers were known not just for their physical prowess but also for their
illicit tendencies and their artistry. Besides being the god of commerce,
Hermes was the god of thieving and the inventor of the lyre.

What happened with messengers after Hermes? The history page of the
International Federation of Bike Messenger Associations' Web site picks up
the story in 1894, when the Pullman rail strike shut down mail delivery to
virtually the entire United States. That year, the site says, a man in
California named Arthur C. Banta came up with a novel solution: He arranged
a relay of bicycle riders to deliver the mail between San Francisco and
Fresno. He even issued stamps with images of these proto-bike messengers on
them.

Later, with the advent of the dense urban core, the idea of the bike
messenger really took off. The federation now counts bike messengers in 29
American cities and 50 other cities worldwide.

IN SEATTLE, an entire culture has grown up around the bike-messenger trade,
a mix of working-class toughness, athleticism, environmentalism, bike
fetishism, artistic openness, mechanical ingenuity, hard living and rebel
rage. Some messengers I knew moonlighted as members of the Infernal Noise
Brigade, the black-clad anarchist marching band you may remember from the
WTO protests; their water-cooler talk was of tear gas, tree-sitting and
Dumpster-diving. And every third rider seemed to have a slogan affixed to
some bit of gear. One popular helmet sticker: "YOU LOOK STUPID DRIVING WITH
A CELL PHONE."

Local messengers have regular "Alley Cat" races around town. At the right
abandoned parking lot, on the right night, you'll find them playing their
trademark game of bike polo, in which bikes substitute for horses. Knock on
the right door at the right time, and you'll find a meeting of the Courier
Association of Seattle (note the acronym, CAOS), the muscle behind the push
to bring the messenger world championships to Seattle.

It's an addictive way of life, full of us-against-the-world energy, and,
because of this, messengers often compare themselves to junkies. A few
actually are junkies, but most mean it this way: They can't quit the job or
the lifestyle, and if they do, they frequently go back.

"I can't deal with a normal work environment," says A.J., a 29-year-old
messenger who has been riding on and off for about eight years. "I refuse."

One reason A.J. stays is that messenger society accepts anyone with the will
to ride, and collectively guards its members against the malevolence of
outsiders. For A.J., this is particularly important because she happens to
be a transsexual in transition from female to male. Unlike much of the rest
of the world, she's found the messenger trade to be a bastion of warmth and
open-mindedness.

"It's not even about accepting," she says. "It's just sort of indifference.
It's just like, 'Oh, OK you're still a messenger, right?' "

CHICAGO MESSENGER Travis Hugh Culley recently wrote a book [excerpt] in
which he lionized bike couriers as an "immortal class" of superheroes who
are "somehow exempt from the so-called universal laws of life and death."

That's one view from the inside. When I told A.J. I was working on this
article, she offered another.

"I'm scared, Eli," she said. "My nightmare would be you misrepresenting
messengering as this dream job that's full of excitement and superheroism.
Sometimes messengering is very humdrum. It's paper shuffling. It's not all
excitement and 'Woo-hoo!' and 'I'm a hero' and 'I'm free.' . . . Sometimes
it's very limiting. You don't always have the financial resources that you'd
like; sometimes you're too tired at the end of the day to do what you want."

In the end, that's why I quit -- too little money, too little energy left
after work. Plus, the winter was coming; if last summer taught me anything,
it is that I'm only a fair-weather messenger.

About Culley's praise of the courier class, A.J. says: "I think it's crap. I
fear death absolutely every day. That's what makes me good . . . I will
admit that, maybe in my first year, I could have aligned with his ideology a
little more readily. But after I got hit by a Cadillac, my views changed."

The idealization of messengers, A.J. says, is "common among people who have
never messengered and among rookies and among young men.

"I think you grow out of it."


© Eli Sanders
31 August 2003, Pacific Northwest
The Seatle Times Magazine

Nice article, Thomas. Thanks for posting it.

Thomas Wentworth wrote:
"greggery peccary" .@. wrote in message
...

hey i'm thinking about applying to work as a messenger. i know there are
some of youse who do this and could use your worldly advice. are these
jobs
hard to get? i am thinking it could be fun because i love riding downtown
and im pretty good at it. im not a racer but in good shape. i do follow
the
traffic laws (unlike most messengers ive seen). are there some services in
the seattle area that are better than others? years ago i was a super
shuttle driver in la and didnt like the dispatch favotitism there. can i
avoid this?
-alan



======
Alan, I found this on the web; thought it was pretty well written.

Hermes
by Eli Sanders

snip

© Eli Sanders
31 August 2003, Pacific Northwest
The Seatle Times Magazine


Thanks, I actually read all of that. very good article!

--
Paul M. Hobson
Georgia Institute of Technology
..:change the words to numbers
if you want to reply to me:.

Thomas Wentworth wrote:

How does it work? Do you get connected to a dispatch system? How do you
get paid? How much does the dispatch system get?

When I did it, you had a walkie-talkie and an early version of a
Blackberry to keep track of runs. You got half of the charged fee.

Can you be your own dispatch and messenger together?

Maybe in Mayberry. :P

If you want to get buff, like the subculture, and want to risk your
life for crap pay, do it. If you simply want some summer cash, skip it.

I rode for a short while in Chicago and was humbled by how decent most
messengers were to each other and how incredibly evil most dispatchers
and messenger companies are.

The pay usually sucks. Add to that the fact that you're having to
consume an xtra couple thousand calories per day in food and have to
pay to maintain your own bike--there's no rational reason to messenger.

It's a cult, not a job. I would never do it again, but I must say, the
short time I worked as a messenger--I did feel like a god.

Might be fun to do for a few months just for the bragging rights. :P

Be careful though. I quit the day I saw a fellow messenger on Michigan
Avenue with two broken femurs being loading into an ambulance.