This New Year's will be the 8th anniversary of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century, and no anniversary of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century would be complete without a time-travel tale that at least attempts to be comparable to the one in which, by simply making the first of a whimsical pair of u-turns with my time-traveling iron steed, I visited 2000 subsequent in time to 2001. That Einstein-defying stunt seemed to heat the Yukon up to double digits in January.
I'm happy to report that I have one for this New Year's: Yesterday morning, I seemed to visit Sunday, 12/28, subsequent in time to Monday, 12/29!
My cellphone rang at 2:50 am, and I thought, "Hmmm, who would be calling in the middle of the night on my _cellphone_!? A) I'm not _substituting_ on this Sunday paper route anymore, and even if I was, it's Monday morning now, not Sunday morning. B) All of the handful of _other_ people who might ever call me in the middle of the night are - partly _by_ _definition_ - not the people who have my cellphone number!"
But I answered it, and what did it turn out to be, but my event reminder telling me that it's 3am "Sunday" and therefore time "4" my paper route.
This was very weird, because for the whole year and a half since I'd discovered how to use this event-reminder feature of my new cellphone, I'd been _religiously_ following that just-before-3am-Sunday timeframe as the time to _always_ be getting ready to do my weekly paperboying. So, although I was tired enough that under normal circumstances I would have gone _right_ back to sleep, I didn't.
Even when I'm on a bike or canoe trip sleeping in the woods near a railroad and the sound of an approaching train wakes me up, my brain's checking and re-checking of the "Am I on the tracks?" consideration only keeps me awake for a minute, if that. (Or two minutes maybe, in the case of my _non_-stopping-for-the-night canoeing days in 1975, when I _was_ in the path of barges that I had to sit up and paddle out of the way of.)
But in this case, it took me an _hour_ to go back to sleep, because, having traveled back in time _before_, I was considering _every_ _angle_ of, "Am I _sure_ that 12/28 is in the _past_? I remember it, and the delivery that I completed on it, very distinctly; however, am I _sure_ that there isn't some _other_ time-warp possibility of how 12/28 could perhaps happen a second time - and for Sunday carriers to be expected to show up and do a repeat 12/28 delivery - subsequent in time to 12/29?"
In conclusion, I feel vindicated now for being one of the last non-users of cellphones; I detested them and didn't knuckle under and get one until I became a paper boy. (They _are_ admittedly useful for a specific purpose such as that.) I think wierd things are _generally_ starting to happen with my cellphone, because a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to _call_ two of the numbers that were in my directory on it, plus several randomly-generated numbers, all by itself!
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Friday, December 26, 2008
Thanks for all the tips!
I'm still receiving tips in the mail every day! Tip for carriers everywhere: Include your address on your Christmas Card that you give to your customers.
And yes, the Times does pass along the regular tips that are given by customers who pay through the Times. Snippets indicate that not all of the customers were sure of that; but, they need not worry: I see those tips every week of the year on the sheet that the Times gives me, including which customers the tips are from.
12/21 delivery report: I finished the delivery very late, and I can't blame the Times, because the papers had arrived at the distribution center on time; how embarrassing.
The only other time that I'd finished even nearly as late as I did this past Sunday, not counting my early-2007 newbie days, had been on last year's last Sunday before Christmas.
The last Sunday before Christmas is the most time-consuming delivery of the year to begin with, due to all the time of sticking my Christmas cards into the papers and stopping at doors to untape all the containing-of-tips ones from customers. But this time, to top it off, I'd left home at 3:20 instead of my usual 3:00.
I'd been up all night Saturday night fixing up a bike with which to improve the efficiency of certain parts of the delivery. It being the first in-the-snow delivery of the season, I figured that that's the time when it's most likely to be advantageous to have the bike along: With the bike (at least on the route segments on which it's worth the time of unloading it from the pickup truck), I can go up the often-cleared driveways - as opposed to taking my usual shortcuts across the lawns, which the snow is an impediment on - to the customers' doorsteps. It's still an ongoing process to figure out which streets this will and won't save time on.
But the Times vindicated me: I called the Times at 8 am (already a half an hour past the proper finishing time) to let them know that I still had a long ways to go (that way, they'd know what to tell any customers who call saying that they don't have their paper), and what did I get but a recording, telling customers to "bear with us" because the deliveries are late due to the weather!
And I had thought that this business prided itself in not letting weather be an excuse.
But finishing late wasn't the most embarrassing thing that I did that morning. Here's what takes the cake: At one customer's door, I took the tip envelope and forgot to leave a paper! Sleep deprivation, I guess.
And yes, the Times does pass along the regular tips that are given by customers who pay through the Times. Snippets indicate that not all of the customers were sure of that; but, they need not worry: I see those tips every week of the year on the sheet that the Times gives me, including which customers the tips are from.
12/21 delivery report: I finished the delivery very late, and I can't blame the Times, because the papers had arrived at the distribution center on time; how embarrassing.
The only other time that I'd finished even nearly as late as I did this past Sunday, not counting my early-2007 newbie days, had been on last year's last Sunday before Christmas.
The last Sunday before Christmas is the most time-consuming delivery of the year to begin with, due to all the time of sticking my Christmas cards into the papers and stopping at doors to untape all the containing-of-tips ones from customers. But this time, to top it off, I'd left home at 3:20 instead of my usual 3:00.
I'd been up all night Saturday night fixing up a bike with which to improve the efficiency of certain parts of the delivery. It being the first in-the-snow delivery of the season, I figured that that's the time when it's most likely to be advantageous to have the bike along: With the bike (at least on the route segments on which it's worth the time of unloading it from the pickup truck), I can go up the often-cleared driveways - as opposed to taking my usual shortcuts across the lawns, which the snow is an impediment on - to the customers' doorsteps. It's still an ongoing process to figure out which streets this will and won't save time on.
But the Times vindicated me: I called the Times at 8 am (already a half an hour past the proper finishing time) to let them know that I still had a long ways to go (that way, they'd know what to tell any customers who call saying that they don't have their paper), and what did I get but a recording, telling customers to "bear with us" because the deliveries are late due to the weather!
And I had thought that this business prided itself in not letting weather be an excuse.
But finishing late wasn't the most embarrassing thing that I did that morning. Here's what takes the cake: At one customer's door, I took the tip envelope and forgot to leave a paper! Sleep deprivation, I guess.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Welcome Customers to the blog, and Merry Christmas to all!
I've got the route's 2008 Christmas Card all cooked up and ready to start sticking into the papers on the 12/21 delivery. This card kills two birds with one stone by 1) wishing y'all a Merry Christmas, and 2) unleashing the url of this blog so as include the route's customers in the potential audience of it and thereby expose myself to one more avenue for comments about my service, as my thank-you for how good-tipping of a route this is.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Our friend the paper-boy CPA
Everybody likes to bash professions other than their own, and I'm no exception when anybody mentions CPAs or the dirt that they play in. I used to like to respond to that type of conversation with, "Do you want your mouth washed out with soap?" My attitude for many years about the dirt that CPAs play in was: Either the common man can figure out for _himself_ how to fill out the forms for appeasing the IRS and its cousins, or, in the cases in which such bureaucrats have failed to make the forms sufficiently simple for the common man to figure out in not too many hours per year, the particular taxpayer who's a victim of this ought to go to Siberia and seek asylum. My fuming about this festered enough for me to figure out how this could probably be done by canoeing from Little Diamede Island to Big Diamede Island.
But then around 1990, the Soviet Union went soft, and the pipe dream therefore ceased to mean anything.
And now I think I'm finally going to delete "CPA scum" from my vocabulary. What triggered my newfound respect for CPAs? Well, over the summer, I learned what one of them moonlights as, after I saw him make a presentation at one of the meetings that we've been having here in the Marcellus Shale about considerations such as how, if a landowner is more money-hungry than you or me and accepts money from a gas company (_if_ that "up front" payment ever even comes - and that's _another_ reason the Frost Farm refuses to sign a company lease: I actually get more payee-friendly fine print as a _paper_ _boy_!), then that landowner can (get the soap ready for washing my mouth out with, folks) count that allegedly-up-front payment as "advance royalty" on his or her tax return and thereby deduct 15% or whatever the number is.
But the thing that I was about to learn that this CPA moonlights as, doesn't have anything to do with that presentation that he did, nor about anything else having to do with the gasmen activity. Rather, this CPA was walking up to me at the end of such meetings to shake my hand and tell me that he sees me in Clarks Summit every Sunday morning.
I guessed that he looked a little bit familiar, but I couldn't recall what _part_ of the route I'd seen him on. So, when I got home, I waded through my paper-route customer lists looking for his last name. It was nowhere to be found; so, next, I assumed that perhaps somebody in his household with a different last name was paying for his house's subscription, and/or perhaps he was one of the few early risers out taking walks or whatever while I'm delivering in their neighborhoods. That exhausts all of the possibilities, right?
Wrong! Where did I see this CPA the next Sunday morning (which was the first Sunday morning that I was _looking_ for his face), but in the distribution center, at 4 am, preparing for his delivery! He's a paper boy!
I think he's doing it to teach his kid to be a paper boy, based on the fact that he frequently brings his kid along to help. The route is even apparently in his kid's name, even though the kid is often apparently at home sleeping while the paper-boy CPA does his route for him. But still, what "typical" CPA would want his kid to be a paper boy?
So, more power to the paper-boy CPA!
If I ever need a CPA, I'm going to go to his office during the week and _pay_ for his advice. I _won't_ do what I saw more than one carrier do at the distribution center this past Sunday: They were walking up to the paper-boy CPA and pumping him for free tax advice, including when he appeared to be trying to concentrate on preparing his piles of newspapers for his delivery! He was graciously giving the free tax advice to them and, I suspect in the process, losing his count of his newspapers. Indeed, one non-tax-related snippet that could be overheard at the distribution center that same morning was that on at least one delivery, the paper-boy CPA hadn't gotten his updates of what customers to stop and start. Well I wonder why?
I hope that by now, by sticking up for _both_ of the professions of the paper-boy CPA and hereby welcoming him to the brotherhood of paper carriers, I've earned my right to appease, in some future post, an ulterior motive that I had in doing so: Stay tuned for a _bashing_ of the "CPA" part of the paper-boy CPA's identity, whenever I get around to writing a certain post here that I've had in my head for a couple of months (although maybe not until after I do some posting about unrelated aspects that are even more on my mind, of my paper-delivery adventures).
Hey, CPAs _are_ fair game, aren't they, judging by the fact that I once saw a big contingent of _them_ making fun of their _own_ profession in a deluxe song that they sung while marching along in a parade?
But then around 1990, the Soviet Union went soft, and the pipe dream therefore ceased to mean anything.
And now I think I'm finally going to delete "CPA scum" from my vocabulary. What triggered my newfound respect for CPAs? Well, over the summer, I learned what one of them moonlights as, after I saw him make a presentation at one of the meetings that we've been having here in the Marcellus Shale about considerations such as how, if a landowner is more money-hungry than you or me and accepts money from a gas company (_if_ that "up front" payment ever even comes - and that's _another_ reason the Frost Farm refuses to sign a company lease: I actually get more payee-friendly fine print as a _paper_ _boy_!), then that landowner can (get the soap ready for washing my mouth out with, folks) count that allegedly-up-front payment as "advance royalty" on his or her tax return and thereby deduct 15% or whatever the number is.
But the thing that I was about to learn that this CPA moonlights as, doesn't have anything to do with that presentation that he did, nor about anything else having to do with the gasmen activity. Rather, this CPA was walking up to me at the end of such meetings to shake my hand and tell me that he sees me in Clarks Summit every Sunday morning.
I guessed that he looked a little bit familiar, but I couldn't recall what _part_ of the route I'd seen him on. So, when I got home, I waded through my paper-route customer lists looking for his last name. It was nowhere to be found; so, next, I assumed that perhaps somebody in his household with a different last name was paying for his house's subscription, and/or perhaps he was one of the few early risers out taking walks or whatever while I'm delivering in their neighborhoods. That exhausts all of the possibilities, right?
Wrong! Where did I see this CPA the next Sunday morning (which was the first Sunday morning that I was _looking_ for his face), but in the distribution center, at 4 am, preparing for his delivery! He's a paper boy!
I think he's doing it to teach his kid to be a paper boy, based on the fact that he frequently brings his kid along to help. The route is even apparently in his kid's name, even though the kid is often apparently at home sleeping while the paper-boy CPA does his route for him. But still, what "typical" CPA would want his kid to be a paper boy?
So, more power to the paper-boy CPA!
If I ever need a CPA, I'm going to go to his office during the week and _pay_ for his advice. I _won't_ do what I saw more than one carrier do at the distribution center this past Sunday: They were walking up to the paper-boy CPA and pumping him for free tax advice, including when he appeared to be trying to concentrate on preparing his piles of newspapers for his delivery! He was graciously giving the free tax advice to them and, I suspect in the process, losing his count of his newspapers. Indeed, one non-tax-related snippet that could be overheard at the distribution center that same morning was that on at least one delivery, the paper-boy CPA hadn't gotten his updates of what customers to stop and start. Well I wonder why?
I hope that by now, by sticking up for _both_ of the professions of the paper-boy CPA and hereby welcoming him to the brotherhood of paper carriers, I've earned my right to appease, in some future post, an ulterior motive that I had in doing so: Stay tuned for a _bashing_ of the "CPA" part of the paper-boy CPA's identity, whenever I get around to writing a certain post here that I've had in my head for a couple of months (although maybe not until after I do some posting about unrelated aspects that are even more on my mind, of my paper-delivery adventures).
Hey, CPAs _are_ fair game, aren't they, judging by the fact that I once saw a big contingent of _them_ making fun of their _own_ profession in a deluxe song that they sung while marching along in a parade?
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