What did they have in common? They both started out with a presentation of fiction, and wound up as unintentional hoaxes that created a lot of alarm!
I got calls both from the Clarks Summit Police and from the Times on Monday, asking me to clarify something that was in my Xmas greeting that I'd stuck into all of the papers on my route on Sunday morning. All that I'd done was include - under a 1962 photo of myself on the greeting - an admittedly-convoluted sentence alluding to "a great explosion in 2010".
Well contrary to how some people apparently interpreted it, I'm not predicting, in that sense of the word, any great explosion in 2010.
I meant, rather, that I wish everybody a great explosion of success in 2010. Everything else about that allusion to "a great explosion in 2010" was simply a boast about the existence, in my archives somewhere, of a mentioning-of-2010 science fiction drawing that I did in 1965 or thereabouts when I was about 10.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Monday, November 30, 2009
Carrier bags work good!
A couple or three months ago, I finally fulfilled my pipe dream of obtaining some of the "carrier bags" that the Times makes available to its carriers.
Wierdly, "makes available" is about all that the Times does in this connection. Not only do they not actively promote them. During my first two and a half years of being a paper boy, I never even saw one, and the only evidence to me that they even existed consisted of one vague snippet - A $5.-each "carrier bags" line on the supply sheet. (Not to be expensively confused, although we'd done so once or twice, with the $1.75-per-hundred for the big Sunday version, plastic "sleeves" that we put the papers in). During all that time, I could only guess that they'd probably be cheap canvas shoulder bags similar to a $3.-at-the-flea-market one that - as I vaguely recall boasted in this blog a while back - I'd been regularly using on one of the streets that I do by foot.
For maximum efficiency on the several 8-to-16-house sections that I do by foot, my ideal goal was to have not just one, but several, such bags, and fill them all up with the appropriate numbers of papers at the same time that I'm sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, thereby eliminating the time-consuming extra handling that occurs when I grab armloads. But with the $2. price difference, I thought, why be in any hurry to see about obtainiany of the Times' carrier bags? More $3. canvas shoulder bags might show up at the flea market. The only (or so I thought at the time) thing that I'd be getting by paying the Times $5. instead of some flea market dealer $3., would be having the Times' name on the side of the bag, and the _Times_ ought to pay _me_ for _that_.
So, I kept on only using my one logo-less, green canvas carrier bag that I'd gotten at the flea market for $3., thereby only gleaning some of the above double-handling-saving advantage on one of the streets. That street, incidentally, was usually Hilltop, because that's my longest - 16 houses to be exact; it grew from 15 in May - by-foot segment. The green canvas bag was accommodating 8 or 10 papers depending on the size of the papers that day; I had to always keep the 8-or-10 number in my head until starting the segment, and then grab the appropriate additional number of papers in my arm to make a total of 16.
But then, a couple or three months ago, there happened to be some conversation at the distribution center about these carrier bags that the Times "used to" have. It surfaced that they still can be special-ordered. So, I ordered 4 of them, and finally got them a month or so later (which was a month or so ago).
Nobody other than me, to my knowledge, has obtained any. At least one semi-bigwig asked, as I picked them up, "What are you going to do with them"?
Well am I the only one who does multiple houses away from his motor vehicle, or what?
It turns out that these bags (which, as I suspected, are white with the Times' name on them) are _well_ _worth_ obtaining; the quality of them is much higher than you'd expect for $5.: The straps are padded, they've got red flourescent material, and, _completely_ unexpectedly, I've been able to fit all 16 of Hilltop's papers into any one of them. (Something about the shape of them, which I haven't figured out, slickly accommodates this.) The fatter-than usual, 11/29 edition was the only one so far to be a tight fit.
Wierdly, "makes available" is about all that the Times does in this connection. Not only do they not actively promote them. During my first two and a half years of being a paper boy, I never even saw one, and the only evidence to me that they even existed consisted of one vague snippet - A $5.-each "carrier bags" line on the supply sheet. (Not to be expensively confused, although we'd done so once or twice, with the $1.75-per-hundred for the big Sunday version, plastic "sleeves" that we put the papers in). During all that time, I could only guess that they'd probably be cheap canvas shoulder bags similar to a $3.-at-the-flea-market one that - as I vaguely recall boasted in this blog a while back - I'd been regularly using on one of the streets that I do by foot.
For maximum efficiency on the several 8-to-16-house sections that I do by foot, my ideal goal was to have not just one, but several, such bags, and fill them all up with the appropriate numbers of papers at the same time that I'm sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, thereby eliminating the time-consuming extra handling that occurs when I grab armloads. But with the $2. price difference, I thought, why be in any hurry to see about obtainiany of the Times' carrier bags? More $3. canvas shoulder bags might show up at the flea market. The only (or so I thought at the time) thing that I'd be getting by paying the Times $5. instead of some flea market dealer $3., would be having the Times' name on the side of the bag, and the _Times_ ought to pay _me_ for _that_.
So, I kept on only using my one logo-less, green canvas carrier bag that I'd gotten at the flea market for $3., thereby only gleaning some of the above double-handling-saving advantage on one of the streets. That street, incidentally, was usually Hilltop, because that's my longest - 16 houses to be exact; it grew from 15 in May - by-foot segment. The green canvas bag was accommodating 8 or 10 papers depending on the size of the papers that day; I had to always keep the 8-or-10 number in my head until starting the segment, and then grab the appropriate additional number of papers in my arm to make a total of 16.
But then, a couple or three months ago, there happened to be some conversation at the distribution center about these carrier bags that the Times "used to" have. It surfaced that they still can be special-ordered. So, I ordered 4 of them, and finally got them a month or so later (which was a month or so ago).
Nobody other than me, to my knowledge, has obtained any. At least one semi-bigwig asked, as I picked them up, "What are you going to do with them"?
Well am I the only one who does multiple houses away from his motor vehicle, or what?
It turns out that these bags (which, as I suspected, are white with the Times' name on them) are _well_ _worth_ obtaining; the quality of them is much higher than you'd expect for $5.: The straps are padded, they've got red flourescent material, and, _completely_ unexpectedly, I've been able to fit all 16 of Hilltop's papers into any one of them. (Something about the shape of them, which I haven't figured out, slickly accommodates this.) The fatter-than usual, 11/29 edition was the only one so far to be a tight fit.
Thursday, July 16, 2009
New driveline on primary bike!
It's been a while since my last post here, because I meant to devote this blog to the paper route and not much new has happened on the paper route. For example, when I did my first-ever-since-owning-the-route, taking of a Sunday off to go canoeing in the Chesapeake in the late spring, it was a complete non-event, as I'd expected it to be, because that's how good my substitute is.
It's been a while since I bothered to take the bike along on the delivery; running is easy enough, and I still haven't gotten around to doing the additional fixing-up that I've been meaning to do on the devoted-to-the-purpose, paperboying bike. But by fixing it up as much as I did last winter, one thing that I learned was that even the crappiest-looking triple chainring, from almost any one of the big-box-store bikes in my junkpile, works fine (even for a "real" cyclist, such as you or I, who is generally bigoted against big-box-store bike parts and prefers bike-shop bike parts - you see I accumulate rusty-but-largely-unworn, big-box-store bike parts because the neighbors are always adding them to my junkpiles).
Meanwhile, my primary bike - a '70s-or-'80s Fuji road bike that I've been using since 1999 after a neighbor added _it_ to my junk pile - had been more and more in need of a new rear wheel lately. Well actually, the only things wrong with its rear wheel were that the pain-in-the-ass sealed bearing has been loose for many thousands of miles, and the freewheel on it was only compatible with my worn chain because I was too much of a turkey to buy a new chain for the last 3 years. That worn chain had also worn out the latest chainring of the proudly-single-chainring crankset that I'd been using for at least 10 (oops - not 17 as I just erroneously boasted on the BicyclingAdvocacy yahoo group) years and being vainglorious about the virtues of the simplicity of.
But this spring, I happened to get a very good rear wheel with a 34-tooth freewheel (_another_ thing I hadn't had in years) at the flea market for $30. Last weekend, I finally got around to putting it on (on my primary bike), together with an old junk triple chainring just like the one that I'd put on the devoted-to-paper-boying bike last winter.
Riding my primary bike with a front derailleur on it for the first time in years, made it such a pleasure to ride, that it produced a significant weekly-milage jump! For example, I rode it to Clarks Summit yesterday morning even though it had barely been over a week since the last time I'd included Clarks Summit on a ride itinerary.
My inspiration for choosing Clarks Summit as a ride destination yesterday was paper-route-related: This past Sunday, I'd accidentally delivered a paper to a house that was supposed to be on vacation stop. It's not good for a paper to be sitting in front of a house all week advertising that nobody's home; so, yesterday, when I was having my usual mid-week craving of a McDonald's breakfast and it was a choice of either Gibson (10 miles north), Carbondale (13 miles southeast) or Clarks Summit (17 miles south), I picked Clarks Summit.
But when I got to the particular house that I wanted to "steal" the Sunday paper from (it was 9 am or so by then), the garage door of it was open and there were people working in there; so, being shy as I am, I simply rode by, figuring, "They're back home already", even though the Sunday paper was still sitting on their front porch untouched.
It took until a few blocks later for the slight screwballity of this to dawn on me: If the people working in the garage were the owners, why was the Sunday paper still untouched? Well, maybe they were contractors or somesuch. Except, they didn't look like contractors; they looked like typical suburbanites. Then a few miles later, _another_ thing - namely something _about_ "typical" suburbanites - dawned on me: They're often so oblivious to what their own neighbors right across the street are doing, that burglars can go in and clean the place out in broad daylight!
Well, I think I'll just take the _non_-busybody approach and hope for the best, in view of what happened the one time - back in the early '70s when _I_ was one of those suburbanites - that I happened to be the only one who knew that the neighbor across the street was away for a week, noticed some strange people going in there, and got worried enough about it to troll my mom into calling the police: It turned out, after the police talked to them, that they _were_ just contractors or somesuch.
It's been a while since I bothered to take the bike along on the delivery; running is easy enough, and I still haven't gotten around to doing the additional fixing-up that I've been meaning to do on the devoted-to-the-purpose, paperboying bike. But by fixing it up as much as I did last winter, one thing that I learned was that even the crappiest-looking triple chainring, from almost any one of the big-box-store bikes in my junkpile, works fine (even for a "real" cyclist, such as you or I, who is generally bigoted against big-box-store bike parts and prefers bike-shop bike parts - you see I accumulate rusty-but-largely-unworn, big-box-store bike parts because the neighbors are always adding them to my junkpiles).
Meanwhile, my primary bike - a '70s-or-'80s Fuji road bike that I've been using since 1999 after a neighbor added _it_ to my junk pile - had been more and more in need of a new rear wheel lately. Well actually, the only things wrong with its rear wheel were that the pain-in-the-ass sealed bearing has been loose for many thousands of miles, and the freewheel on it was only compatible with my worn chain because I was too much of a turkey to buy a new chain for the last 3 years. That worn chain had also worn out the latest chainring of the proudly-single-chainring crankset that I'd been using for at least 10 (oops - not 17 as I just erroneously boasted on the BicyclingAdvocacy yahoo group) years and being vainglorious about the virtues of the simplicity of.
But this spring, I happened to get a very good rear wheel with a 34-tooth freewheel (_another_ thing I hadn't had in years) at the flea market for $30. Last weekend, I finally got around to putting it on (on my primary bike), together with an old junk triple chainring just like the one that I'd put on the devoted-to-paper-boying bike last winter.
Riding my primary bike with a front derailleur on it for the first time in years, made it such a pleasure to ride, that it produced a significant weekly-milage jump! For example, I rode it to Clarks Summit yesterday morning even though it had barely been over a week since the last time I'd included Clarks Summit on a ride itinerary.
My inspiration for choosing Clarks Summit as a ride destination yesterday was paper-route-related: This past Sunday, I'd accidentally delivered a paper to a house that was supposed to be on vacation stop. It's not good for a paper to be sitting in front of a house all week advertising that nobody's home; so, yesterday, when I was having my usual mid-week craving of a McDonald's breakfast and it was a choice of either Gibson (10 miles north), Carbondale (13 miles southeast) or Clarks Summit (17 miles south), I picked Clarks Summit.
But when I got to the particular house that I wanted to "steal" the Sunday paper from (it was 9 am or so by then), the garage door of it was open and there were people working in there; so, being shy as I am, I simply rode by, figuring, "They're back home already", even though the Sunday paper was still sitting on their front porch untouched.
It took until a few blocks later for the slight screwballity of this to dawn on me: If the people working in the garage were the owners, why was the Sunday paper still untouched? Well, maybe they were contractors or somesuch. Except, they didn't look like contractors; they looked like typical suburbanites. Then a few miles later, _another_ thing - namely something _about_ "typical" suburbanites - dawned on me: They're often so oblivious to what their own neighbors right across the street are doing, that burglars can go in and clean the place out in broad daylight!
Well, I think I'll just take the _non_-busybody approach and hope for the best, in view of what happened the one time - back in the early '70s when _I_ was one of those suburbanites - that I happened to be the only one who knew that the neighbor across the street was away for a week, noticed some strange people going in there, and got worried enough about it to troll my mom into calling the police: It turned out, after the police talked to them, that they _were_ just contractors or somesuch.
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
General! - and Mr. Yagi
I think I told y'all some of the story of how, early on in my takeover of the route in 2007, I cooked up a set of homemade maps of the route.
It's been a long time since I looked at them myself more than once or twice per street, because I got so familiar with the streets after about the first year. But, it'll keep on being relevent for making it easy for my substitute (whom it looks like I'll be finally getting around to using one Sunday later in the spring), to maintain, on the maps, a detail or two about a house or two on each street (thereby making the rest of the houses on that street easy to locate also). And now I have one more detail to scribble in:
One of the customers has a ham radio antenna that, in late 2007, I happened to read in the Times-Tribune about a controversy about. As _my_ part in the controversy, for a while after reading about that, I went a few feet out of my way to give him his paper extra early, various times when it happened to be handy to do so - despite my own ham status being, as I confessed to y'all in "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", a lazily-just-renewing-since-the-1970s Novice.
Well, in an update of "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", I'm happy to report that last Wednesday, I went to Scranton (proudly still overdue for the same haircut that I'd been overdue for when I'd passed the arguably-a-_downgrade_-from-Novice, "Technician" on March 11) and passed the second of the three tests that I'd boasted that I was going to work on, and thereby upgraded to General. (I must give credit to www.aa9pw.com for the practice tests there, of which I've now begun working on the Extra.)
And one of the things that I've learned, is that the kind of antenna that that ham on the route has is a Yagi. So, I'll be writing "Yagi antenna" on the map.
My elmer boasts that he met the inventer of it, Mr. Yagi himself, at the end of WWII.
It's been a long time since I looked at them myself more than once or twice per street, because I got so familiar with the streets after about the first year. But, it'll keep on being relevent for making it easy for my substitute (whom it looks like I'll be finally getting around to using one Sunday later in the spring), to maintain, on the maps, a detail or two about a house or two on each street (thereby making the rest of the houses on that street easy to locate also). And now I have one more detail to scribble in:
One of the customers has a ham radio antenna that, in late 2007, I happened to read in the Times-Tribune about a controversy about. As _my_ part in the controversy, for a while after reading about that, I went a few feet out of my way to give him his paper extra early, various times when it happened to be handy to do so - despite my own ham status being, as I confessed to y'all in "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", a lazily-just-renewing-since-the-1970s Novice.
Well, in an update of "What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark", I'm happy to report that last Wednesday, I went to Scranton (proudly still overdue for the same haircut that I'd been overdue for when I'd passed the arguably-a-_downgrade_-from-Novice, "Technician" on March 11) and passed the second of the three tests that I'd boasted that I was going to work on, and thereby upgraded to General. (I must give credit to www.aa9pw.com for the practice tests there, of which I've now begun working on the Extra.)
And one of the things that I've learned, is that the kind of antenna that that ham on the route has is a Yagi. So, I'll be writing "Yagi antenna" on the map.
My elmer boasts that he met the inventer of it, Mr. Yagi himself, at the end of WWII.
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Lackawanna Lake solid enough to bike on
My Thursday bike ride to Clarks Summit included riding right across the lake at Lackawanna State Park.
After the first few feet, before the water got deep, I dismounted and walked a little ways just to get a better feel for whether it was crackling (because I was entering in a slightly different place than the ice fishermen were, plus I suspect that a 27 x 1 1/4" or 1 3/8" tire concentrates the weight a little bit more than shoes do). But it wasn't crackling an iota, nor even hardly sagging (and years ago, logging with my tractor on the Frost Farm's beaver lake, I got away with making a whole bunch of trips with it sagging _a_ _lot_ - the trick is to just keep moving - but I was nuts back then), so I re-mounted and zipped right across, and up the boat ramp on the other side.
No knobbies; just slicks on my road bike. But traction was no problem, thanks to evenly-spaced patches of a thin crust of snow on the ice.
These sporadic weekday rides that I take to Clarks Summit are somewhat related to the paper route in that they're usually timed to include a stop at the distribution center when it's still open, to pick up a check.
Hmmm, I better hurry up and take an extra ride or two just to Lackawanna State Park; it got to be like spring yesterday so I bet I've only got a few more days to see if I can try riding the _length_ of that lake instead of just across it.
After the first few feet, before the water got deep, I dismounted and walked a little ways just to get a better feel for whether it was crackling (because I was entering in a slightly different place than the ice fishermen were, plus I suspect that a 27 x 1 1/4" or 1 3/8" tire concentrates the weight a little bit more than shoes do). But it wasn't crackling an iota, nor even hardly sagging (and years ago, logging with my tractor on the Frost Farm's beaver lake, I got away with making a whole bunch of trips with it sagging _a_ _lot_ - the trick is to just keep moving - but I was nuts back then), so I re-mounted and zipped right across, and up the boat ramp on the other side.
No knobbies; just slicks on my road bike. But traction was no problem, thanks to evenly-spaced patches of a thin crust of snow on the ice.
These sporadic weekday rides that I take to Clarks Summit are somewhat related to the paper route in that they're usually timed to include a stop at the distribution center when it's still open, to pick up a check.
Hmmm, I better hurry up and take an extra ride or two just to Lackawanna State Park; it got to be like spring yesterday so I bet I've only got a few more days to see if I can try riding the _length_ of that lake instead of just across it.
Oops, I was too quick to compliment PennDOT
That traffic signal does not detect a bicycle!
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
Therefore, it fails the Susquehanna County Wheelmen Triad Compliance Spot Check, which I happened to conduct on it at 2:45am 3/1/09.
Obviously, this blog isn't being read by my PennDOT-bigwig, cycling-event-participant-buddy customer after all.
The Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm requires that cyclists act and be treated as driver of vehicles. Readers of SCW's sporadic newsletter "The Triadal Core Protection Forum" (which has been on its duff since 2004 and which this blog semi-supercedes) will recall my rarely-limited-to-Susquehanna-County spoutings about how basic it is for a traffic signal to detect a metal bike like it detects any other vehicle (and about how ultra-yuppies with carbon fiber bikes, on the other hand, can be left out with unshod horses as far as I'm concerned - I'm practical, too, you see).
But it usually takes a while for a rural-resident cyclist such as myself (even in my own county, all three of the traffic-light towns in which are even further from the Frost Farm than Clarks Summit is) to happen to be cycling through a signalized intersection at a sufficiently wee hour (i.e. with no cars around to trip the signal for me and thereby hide the problem) to apprehend it failing to detect me. That is why, for example, the SCW Systematic Ride of Susquehanna County - a several-year project that I completed in 2000 although I never got around to sifting through the data therefrom afterwards - had to include 3am-start editions for at least one each, of its Montrose, Hallstead and Susquehanna legs.
In Lackawanna County and partly for similar reasons, this blog's previous discussions about our most-impeding-of-paper-carriers-in-Clarks-Summit traffic signal - namely the one where we turn left onto rt. 11 next to the video store while leaving the distribution center - focused on how long that signal took to respond, and sometimes not respond, to the presence of our motor vehicles. Besides distance from home, the other part of the reason I focused only on the motoring aspect was that, as I discussed back in "About the name of this blog", this blog makes no apologies for the fact that motoring is current state of the art of how I always do at least certain parts of the route (and that applies especially to how I leave the distribution center, when I have the full load).
So it took me until 3/1/09 - two years into doing this route - to happen to get a chance to do an SCW Triad Compliance Spot Check of this particular traffic signal.
3/1 just happened to be the second Sunday in a row that I'd arrived at the distribution center at 2:30 instead of my usual 3:45 (because my Route Associate was taking a well-deserved couple of Saturdays off from preparing the inside sections for me, and this time I'd finally worked up enough guts to try the more challenging version of preparing them myself, namely waiting until Sunday morning to do it instead of taking any Saturday trip to Clarks Summit). The previous Sunday, 2/22, I'd found the distribution center to be already open at 2:30 (instead of the apparently-usual 3:00), but on 3/1, it wasn't; so, I had some time to kill.
I used some of that time by yanking the bike down from the pickup truck and riding it the couple hundred feet to that traffic light.
And there I sat for a whole 4 minutes or more (entertained, at least, by punks in the parking lot of the restaurant across the street who were having a little bit too much of a fracus to notice me), and then I turned around.
I also found, later that same morning while going through that intersection with my pickup truck as usual after loading the papers, that it's back to taking a minute or two (as opposed to the "instantly" of 2/15 and 2/22) to turn green for a motor vehicle.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Thank you, PennDOT!
I'm happy to report a snippet or two of evidence that this blog has at least some readership among the route's customers.
The main such snippet is that on both the 2/15 and 2/22 deliveries, the "unresponsive" traffic signal that I'd spouted off about in this blog less than two weeks earlier, turned green _instantly_ in response to my pickup truck's presence! Voila, two minutes shaved off my delivery time; the easiest two minutes I've ever shaved off.
That had _never_ happened before at that particular signal, in my whole two years of doing the route. When it happened on 2/15, I thought it might be a freak, but when it happened again on 2/22, there was no longer any doubt that PennDOT had done something.
The prime "suspect" of who to hereby thank (just like in 2007 when he got a certain new "Motor Vehicles Only" sign removed from the ramp leading from Business Rt. 6 onto Rt. 11 northbound just west of Dickson City after I'd spouted off on the internet about _that_, thereby upholding cyclists' Right to Travel from Scranton to Clarks Summit, Lenoxville or Canada) is a certain customer on the route who happens to also be a PennDOT bigwig and cycling-event-participation buddy of mine, going back years before I became a paper boy.
A second snippet of evidence, this one admittedly less definitive, that customers might be reading this blog (or equally likely in this case: they read the obituaries in the 2/11 Times-Tribune) is that on the door of another customer, I found a sympathy card, which I also hereby thank them for.
The main such snippet is that on both the 2/15 and 2/22 deliveries, the "unresponsive" traffic signal that I'd spouted off about in this blog less than two weeks earlier, turned green _instantly_ in response to my pickup truck's presence! Voila, two minutes shaved off my delivery time; the easiest two minutes I've ever shaved off.
That had _never_ happened before at that particular signal, in my whole two years of doing the route. When it happened on 2/15, I thought it might be a freak, but when it happened again on 2/22, there was no longer any doubt that PennDOT had done something.
The prime "suspect" of who to hereby thank (just like in 2007 when he got a certain new "Motor Vehicles Only" sign removed from the ramp leading from Business Rt. 6 onto Rt. 11 northbound just west of Dickson City after I'd spouted off on the internet about _that_, thereby upholding cyclists' Right to Travel from Scranton to Clarks Summit, Lenoxville or Canada) is a certain customer on the route who happens to also be a PennDOT bigwig and cycling-event-participation buddy of mine, going back years before I became a paper boy.
A second snippet of evidence, this one admittedly less definitive, that customers might be reading this blog (or equally likely in this case: they read the obituaries in the 2/11 Times-Tribune) is that on the door of another customer, I found a sympathy card, which I also hereby thank them for.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
What I'll be doing when the TV goes dark
The radio hams among my valued readers will know that the "sk" that I whimsically ended my last post with means "silent key". Sk is used by hams to sign off at the end of a transmission, or, less routinely, to refer to a deceased fellow ham. For example, "Silent Keys" is the name of the obituary section of the American Radio Relay League's magazine "QST".
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
My dad's call sign as an Extra Class ham is K3DM. I say "is" rather than "was", because based on the last time that I checked his licence at the FCC's website (earlier today), the FCC doesn't know yet that he's a Silent Key. And, based on what I'm suddenly beginning to learn: Shhhhhhhhhhhh! Each day that it takes them to find out, gives me that much more of a valuable delay in the start of a two-year countdown to a formidable deadline that I'm about to describe.
The only way to get that short of a call sign is to be Extra Class, which is the hardest-to-earn, most elite ham licence of all. There are very few Extra Class hams around, but my dad and I knew of one other one here in Susquehanna County.
This other Extra Class ham started coming around here to the Frost Farm in the last few days, telling me that I'm first in line to get the call sign K3DM and that I should try to get it before somebody outside the family snaps it up. Once the FCC learns that it's a Silent Key, I'll only have a two-year window in which to meet the important other (i.e. besides who I am) requirement for getting it. That other requirement is, I must become Extra Class.
Well that's a _very_ tall order. I, KA3CZN, have been sitting on the duff of Novice class ever since the 1970s, partly because my cows knocked over the dipole, but also largely because I considered the mere thought of trying to learn enough to upgrade to even _General_ class to be _intimidating_.
But several things happened in the last few days that have made me decide to accept the challenge. In particular, I've had it up to my _eyeballs_ with the various aspects of modern technology that are similar to the phenomenon that I vented about earlier on this blog, about how nose-ring-generation-type, text-messaging punks don't even know that what they're doing is way more complicated to learn than, and inferior to, Morse Code.
In one example, there was an editorial in yesterday's Scranton Times-Tribune that sounded as if _I_ could have wrote it; that's how much I agreed with it. It was by a guy bashing the governmental requirement for the switch to digital TV. The guy didn't bash the _concept_ of switching to digital; just the fact that it was being done by too-central of planning (which, for example, neglects localities that won't receive the digital signal even with the best equipment) and with the coupons for the converter boxes keeping the price of the converter boxes artificially high.
The editorial, together with other recent snippets from other sources, also confirmed my suspicion that the coupons are indeed a government subsidy to the industry. So, that settles it: I'm _not_ going to bother getting a converter box; not until maybe after my TV has gone dark for a few months and the converter boxes start showing up at flea markets for $5.
Another example, also from yesterday, was the straw that broke the camel's back:
I was trying to hang up on a recorded telemarketing call. The phone that the Frost Farm has been using for the last 10 or 15 years is pretty modern in my book, but it took that whole 10 or 15 years to apparently discover this thing about it: Right after hanging up, I picked it up again just to check that I'd indeed hung it up - which I had; the button had indeed gotten depressed and I didn't hear anything, and then I picked it back up and the button popped back up - but when it popped back up, instead of hearing a dial tone, I heard a resumption of the same recorded telemarketing call! I did the same thing several times, and every time, when the button popped back up, the telemarketing call was still there!
I was _infuriated_! For about the first minute, I thought it was some new insideous trick by the company making the telemarketing call, to prevent you from being able to get rid of them. I began scheming of tracking the company down and going there and _barging_ into their office.
Then after about a minute, the thing that I was infuriated _about_, changed: It dawned on me that more likely, it's the _phone_, and that perhaps it was designed to not terminate _any_ call, even when it's hung up, unless the party on the other end has also hung up. Or something like that.
I began fuming about the implications: If I'm correct in that theory, then it might not be as safe as people generally think it is to cuss associates out behind their back immediately after ending a phone conversation with them, because _what_ _if_ the other party can _hear_ you after you've hung up (even though, in my unintentional experiment yesterday, _I_ couldn't hear _them_ during the time that the button was depressed)?!!!!!
Granted, I almost never do cuss associates out or otherwise talk about them behind their back after ending phone conversations with them (I don't recall the last time that I did; I guess it was 10 years or so ago); but, it's the principle: Once that button is depressed, there's an expectation of privacy (and although I _guess_ they _can't_ hear me, "expectation of privacy" requires something _simpler_ such as _call_ _ended_).
And since it _took_ me the whole 10 or 15 years of using that new-generation phone to _discover_ that hanging it up (including making sure that the button is depressed, shutting up the voice on the other end) doesn't necessarily end the call, I'm wondering what _other_ back-stabbing tricks modern devices might be doing to me that I _haven't_ discovered.
In short, _screw_ _all_ other-than-good-old-Morse-Code, electronic communications technologies.
Or more precisely: Bothering to become any more computer literate than I am, is going to have to take a _back_ _seat_ to studying _ham_ _radio_, and studying ham radio _vigorously_ enough to have a _fighting_ _chance_ of becoming Extra Class in time to beat other hams to the call sign K3DM. (The still-living Extra Class friend has told me that these other Extra Class hams will be swooping in like vultures the _instant_ that the 2-year time window expires; call signs that short are _very_ coveted; the FCC doesn't issue them to _even_ Extra Class hams anymore except after the holder of one dies.)
And that's why I've reneged from what I said at the end of my Feb. 11 post, about how I'd give related updates (like my two posts of today) by doing an expansion of _that_ post - which, as it turns out, can't be done with this old Mac. Only the "New Post" field works; the "Edit Posts" field doesn't appear, but who cares.
2/8 and 2/15 Delivery Reports
I'm happy to report that I made the audience laugh a couple or three times during my speech at my nuclear-physicist dad's funeral. One of the times was after the part about how during his stargazing with us kids, his lessons to us included everything about the nuclear reactions going on inside the stars. I bungled the word "nuclear" about three times, then finally said it correctly, and then said, "At least I'm not as bad as Bush." The full text of the speech (written largely by my sisters but with last-minute editing by me - the exact opposite of how the obituary, on the other hand, had been written) can be found in the "Robert Thompson Frost" Guestbook at the funeral-home website, www.chadwickmckinney.com
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
I used a bike again on a small part of the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries. On both 2/8 and 2/15, I arrived in Clarks Summit from the south rather than from the north, due to all of the renewed yo-yoing to Philadelphia that I've been doing ever since getting the news in the late evening of 2/6 that my dad had slipped on the ice and had a stroke. And when I visit Philadelphia under _any_ circumstances and don't have time to _go_ by bike, the next best thing for keeping my sanity is to at least have my bike _along_.
This meant that the bike that I used on the 2/8 and 2/15 deliveries wasn't the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike that I'd recently been boasting about fixing up, but rather, my "real"-cycling bike, i.e. the dropped-handlebars one that I do most of my cycling miles with. That's always the one that I have along on my trips to Philadelphia, because it's better for distance. Even the pansy, remote-start rides that I take down there (when I "cheated" by, as usual lately, not starting from Lenoxville) are longer than the one-or-two-block ones that I do for segments of the paper route.
This also meant that I had to contend with toe clips and the lack of a kickstand, which made the at-almost-every-house dismountings very tricky, just like with the time in September that I used this bike. It looks like I might wind up using this particular bike as opposed to the other one, more often than I'd planned (due to the need for my mom to be visited more often now and hence, more of a tendency by me to whimsically bomb the rest of the way down to Philadelphia while I'm at it after finishing the delivery, as long as I'm as far south as Clarks Summit), and therefore, I hope to get around to removing the toe clips and installing a kickstand (thereby making this bike very much like the devoted-to-newspaper-delivery bike) in time for this Sunday.
sk
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Robert T. "Thom" Frost, 1924-2009
The written-largely-by-me obituary of my dad was printed in today's issue, the Wednesday 2/11/09 issue, of the Scranton Times-Tribune, one of a few newspapers that we sent it to. A hair-less-edited and faster-loading version can be found at http://www.chadwickmckinney.com
Stay tuned for a likely expansion of this post later, after I do my third-since-last-Saturday motoring yo-yo to the Philadelphia area where I'm apparently the one who's expected to do the Remembrance speech at the funeral Friday. The tone aims to be jovial. Oh we do cry; just not when you're looking.
Stay tuned for a likely expansion of this post later, after I do my third-since-last-Saturday motoring yo-yo to the Philadelphia area where I'm apparently the one who's expected to do the Remembrance speech at the funeral Friday. The tone aims to be jovial. Oh we do cry; just not when you're looking.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The unresponsive traffic signal and what a CPA would do about it
The paper-boy CPA has done it again! Yesterday, for the second time in a few months, my timing was such that I was leaving the distribution center at the appropriate time for observing him do a certain thing. It's rare for any two carriers to happen to leave the distribution center in the same several-minute period, but yesterday, I was a half-minute behind him, thereby getting a bird's-eye view.
And sure enough, he did the same thing that he'd done the time in October that I'd happened to be in a position to see it. I would have used it as fodder for this diatribe _then_ if my home 'pooter hadn't just broken down then; but, it's just as well that instead, I had time in the meantime to more properly introduce him to y'all, in my "Our friend the paper-boy CPA" entry.
I'll save _what_ he did (which, I imagine, was the thing that any CPA would do) for the punch line.
Incidentally, I hope that this blog's "actually multimodal" subtitle confession shows up on most computers (it usually doesn't on this old Mac that I recently hooked up, but since my fan Mr. Ardelli informs me that the Mac's model number indicates that it's _very_ "old", I suspect that it shows up for everybody except me). That's important because, contrary to the "Bicycle Messengering" other part of the title, I haven't brought my bike along on the delivery again yet since the last times that I boasted about doing so. I'm waiting until I get around to scrounging another freewheel for it (maybe I will by next Sunday). Nor, even when I do bring the bike along, does my current paperboying state of the art accommodate riding it to leave the distribution center, because that's a part of the trip on which I'm hauling the full load. In short, this diatribe will be about a location where I'm always motoring when on the delivery.
But unresponsive traffic signals is a subject that cyclists often discuss, because usually when one of those metal-detector loops fails to detect a vehicle, the vehicle that it fails to detect is a bike and it has no problem at all detecting a car or truck.
That's a violation of the principle that a bicycle is a vehicle. On the Chainguard yahoo group, they call it a violation of "VC", or the vehicular-cycling principle, but I have an even more succinct thing to call it: It's a violation of the Triad, i.e. my proposed Bicyclists' Rights Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm (which in my opinion is the only succinct _and_ comprehensive summary of all of the important aspects of the vehicular-cycling principle).
The traffic signal exiting the distribution center, on the other hand (the one for those of us who turn left onto rt. 11, by the video store, to be exact) is unresponsive in a way that _doesn't_ necessarily discriminate against cyclists: It's apparently unreliable in detecting _motor_ vehicles!
A separate problem with it is how long it makes you sit there even when it does detect you. In 2007, it could be counted on to waste a whole 3 minutes of your time, and then, since sometime in 2008, it's been only about 2 minutes; I guess they must have adjusted it. The simplest option of what they _should_ have done and which they still could do - to solve the problem at least for during these pre-dawn hours that we're talking about, when traffic is sparse - is simply change it to flash mode.
The part that earns this signal an F, however, is that about once every few months, it completely _fails_ to detect my pickup truck! I don't know whether this is because I'm 4-wheel-drive and therefore high off the ground; nor am I sure whether the way that I got the frequency of the problem _down_ to only once every few months was by getting centered in the lane further back.
The expert on the matter whether you're cycling or motoring - John Forester http://www.JohnForester.com - says that when one of these vehicle-actuated traffic signals fails to detect you, the signal is defective and, therefore, it's legal to treat it as a stop sign, _after_ you've waited long enough to be _sure_ that it's failed to detect you, such as through a full cycle. At this particular light, that generally means when, at around the 4th minute, a vehicle is coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on the other side of rt. 11 and the light for _his_ direction turns green, stopping the rt. 11 traffic for him but not for you, and then rt. 11 gets the green again and it still stays red for you.
_That's_ when, once every few months, I run it.
But by that, I mean treat it as a stop sign, _not_ _simply_ run it, and here's a textbook example of why: Out of the grand total of about 4 times that I've done so, and out of an about-equal-grand-total number of times that I've happened to see an unlit cyclist who seems to routinely cruise south along rt. 11 sometime around the time that I'm starting the delivery, the timings of _two_ of my runnings of that red light were such that, on both occasions, I would have collided with that unlit cyclist if I had simply hit the accelerator at the moment that I'd decided to go and didn't see any vehicle lights coming, as opposed to made sure to fully treat the red light as a stop sign.
(I only _marginally_ _saw_ the cyclist, both times. That's two separate near-collisions, 6 months or so apart, between probably the same two vehicles, with the same two errors constituting 50%, each, of the cause of each: Failure of a cyclist to use a headlight at night, and failure of an engineer/bureaucrat to make a traffic signal that's not in flash mode do its job of otherwise clarifying right-of-way.)
I imagine that the rest of the carriers are similarly careful when pulling out onto rt. 11 there (i.e. by looking _more_ carefully than the Triad requires, as the Triad only requires one to look for vehicles that have at least one headlight, at night), judging by how long that untriadally-unlit cyclist has lasted.
Indeed, one of the things that it didn't take very long for me to notice when I started being a paper boy, is that the brotherhood of paper carriers consists of generally more law-abiding of drivers than, for example, the brotherhood of bicycle messengers.
That's based on what little I know about bicycle messengers, which admittedly isn't much. All I know is that 1) I witness some of their unnecessary-looking scofflawry on my rare visits to places like Philadelphia, 2) a certain faction of my opponents on the cycling discussion groups (the faction that I've already done some bashing of on this blog) likes to puff up bicycle messengers as a better-than-you-or-me brotherhood and glorify the scofflawry thereof, and 3) there's probably little if anything to be found on the internet that's written by _real_ bicycle messengers, because _real_ bicycle messengers probably don't have time for the mouse-potatoing, and therefore, everything that's written about them by my opponents in (2) (and even by other wannabes, such as myself) can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, in order to learn more, one of the things that I pipe dreamed for 20 years of doing for just a couple of weeks as a vacation sometime (but I've still never gotten around to doing so), was going to be to find some vagrantage somewhere around the waters of New York City that's sufficiently safe for sleeping in my canoe each night (hotel? forget it; that'd eat all of the profits; I want the adventure to be profitable too) and try being a bicycle messenger, just to show that it can be done without the red light running, etc. that messengers are infamous for. Finally, in 2007, I did the next best thing - getting this paper route, a strategy by which I figured I'd learn similar-to-messengering skills (the most-challenging-for-me one of which was the fast, back-to-back address-finding) without having to go any farther from home than Clarks Summit.
A key part of my motive (besides the money), both for the pipe dream and for this version thereof that I finally did, was to "get inside the heads of messengers" so as to be on a more credible pulpit from which to spout my promotions of how universally-applicable my Triadal principles are. And since I lived too far from "real" bicycle-messengering territory to infiltrate them, infiltrating paper carriers would have to do.
And here's what I found: When you're a paper carrier, the other paper carriers (all without even _calling_ their profession a brotherhood; this _blog_ is the only place where _that's_ done, and how much you want to bet bicycle messengers don't either; that too is probably only on the internet) stay behind you not only when you're waiting at a too-long, unnecessary red light. They stay behind you when you're going "only" 100% of the speed limit - which, on the 25 mph section of rt. 11 between the area of the distribution center and W. Grove, is otherwise unheard of.
Therefore, it would seem that this brotherhood of paper carriers (which constitutes the majority of the pre-dawn traffic approaching, from the shopping center where the distribution center is, the particular above-described stupid traffic signal) ought to have an unspoken system (and I think they do, except it seems that the CPA paper boy is exempt from it) of "drafting" each other through that signal:
In one example, if the signal is completely failing to detect a high pickup truck that day, a lower-sprung vehicle might eventually file in behind me and trip the signal for me; that's happened a number of times. In another example, when the signal _is_ detecting the first vehicle that comes along but taking, as always, two minutes to get around to turning green for it, then a vehicle that arrives second (such as myself yesterday) ought to be able to able to have a shorter wait because the vehicle in front has already made the signal start the two-minute countdown.
But did that happen yesterday? No! Not when the vehicle in front is driven by a CPA. The paper-boy CPA simply _ran_ the red light.
Leave it to a CPA.
And sure enough, he did the same thing that he'd done the time in October that I'd happened to be in a position to see it. I would have used it as fodder for this diatribe _then_ if my home 'pooter hadn't just broken down then; but, it's just as well that instead, I had time in the meantime to more properly introduce him to y'all, in my "Our friend the paper-boy CPA" entry.
I'll save _what_ he did (which, I imagine, was the thing that any CPA would do) for the punch line.
Incidentally, I hope that this blog's "actually multimodal" subtitle confession shows up on most computers (it usually doesn't on this old Mac that I recently hooked up, but since my fan Mr. Ardelli informs me that the Mac's model number indicates that it's _very_ "old", I suspect that it shows up for everybody except me). That's important because, contrary to the "Bicycle Messengering" other part of the title, I haven't brought my bike along on the delivery again yet since the last times that I boasted about doing so. I'm waiting until I get around to scrounging another freewheel for it (maybe I will by next Sunday). Nor, even when I do bring the bike along, does my current paperboying state of the art accommodate riding it to leave the distribution center, because that's a part of the trip on which I'm hauling the full load. In short, this diatribe will be about a location where I'm always motoring when on the delivery.
But unresponsive traffic signals is a subject that cyclists often discuss, because usually when one of those metal-detector loops fails to detect a vehicle, the vehicle that it fails to detect is a bike and it has no problem at all detecting a car or truck.
That's a violation of the principle that a bicycle is a vehicle. On the Chainguard yahoo group, they call it a violation of "VC", or the vehicular-cycling principle, but I have an even more succinct thing to call it: It's a violation of the Triad, i.e. my proposed Bicyclists' Rights Triad http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm (which in my opinion is the only succinct _and_ comprehensive summary of all of the important aspects of the vehicular-cycling principle).
The traffic signal exiting the distribution center, on the other hand (the one for those of us who turn left onto rt. 11, by the video store, to be exact) is unresponsive in a way that _doesn't_ necessarily discriminate against cyclists: It's apparently unreliable in detecting _motor_ vehicles!
A separate problem with it is how long it makes you sit there even when it does detect you. In 2007, it could be counted on to waste a whole 3 minutes of your time, and then, since sometime in 2008, it's been only about 2 minutes; I guess they must have adjusted it. The simplest option of what they _should_ have done and which they still could do - to solve the problem at least for during these pre-dawn hours that we're talking about, when traffic is sparse - is simply change it to flash mode.
The part that earns this signal an F, however, is that about once every few months, it completely _fails_ to detect my pickup truck! I don't know whether this is because I'm 4-wheel-drive and therefore high off the ground; nor am I sure whether the way that I got the frequency of the problem _down_ to only once every few months was by getting centered in the lane further back.
The expert on the matter whether you're cycling or motoring - John Forester http://www.JohnForester.com - says that when one of these vehicle-actuated traffic signals fails to detect you, the signal is defective and, therefore, it's legal to treat it as a stop sign, _after_ you've waited long enough to be _sure_ that it's failed to detect you, such as through a full cycle. At this particular light, that generally means when, at around the 4th minute, a vehicle is coming out of the Dunkin Donuts parking lot on the other side of rt. 11 and the light for _his_ direction turns green, stopping the rt. 11 traffic for him but not for you, and then rt. 11 gets the green again and it still stays red for you.
_That's_ when, once every few months, I run it.
But by that, I mean treat it as a stop sign, _not_ _simply_ run it, and here's a textbook example of why: Out of the grand total of about 4 times that I've done so, and out of an about-equal-grand-total number of times that I've happened to see an unlit cyclist who seems to routinely cruise south along rt. 11 sometime around the time that I'm starting the delivery, the timings of _two_ of my runnings of that red light were such that, on both occasions, I would have collided with that unlit cyclist if I had simply hit the accelerator at the moment that I'd decided to go and didn't see any vehicle lights coming, as opposed to made sure to fully treat the red light as a stop sign.
(I only _marginally_ _saw_ the cyclist, both times. That's two separate near-collisions, 6 months or so apart, between probably the same two vehicles, with the same two errors constituting 50%, each, of the cause of each: Failure of a cyclist to use a headlight at night, and failure of an engineer/bureaucrat to make a traffic signal that's not in flash mode do its job of otherwise clarifying right-of-way.)
I imagine that the rest of the carriers are similarly careful when pulling out onto rt. 11 there (i.e. by looking _more_ carefully than the Triad requires, as the Triad only requires one to look for vehicles that have at least one headlight, at night), judging by how long that untriadally-unlit cyclist has lasted.
Indeed, one of the things that it didn't take very long for me to notice when I started being a paper boy, is that the brotherhood of paper carriers consists of generally more law-abiding of drivers than, for example, the brotherhood of bicycle messengers.
That's based on what little I know about bicycle messengers, which admittedly isn't much. All I know is that 1) I witness some of their unnecessary-looking scofflawry on my rare visits to places like Philadelphia, 2) a certain faction of my opponents on the cycling discussion groups (the faction that I've already done some bashing of on this blog) likes to puff up bicycle messengers as a better-than-you-or-me brotherhood and glorify the scofflawry thereof, and 3) there's probably little if anything to be found on the internet that's written by _real_ bicycle messengers, because _real_ bicycle messengers probably don't have time for the mouse-potatoing, and therefore, everything that's written about them by my opponents in (2) (and even by other wannabes, such as myself) can be taken with a grain of salt.
So, in order to learn more, one of the things that I pipe dreamed for 20 years of doing for just a couple of weeks as a vacation sometime (but I've still never gotten around to doing so), was going to be to find some vagrantage somewhere around the waters of New York City that's sufficiently safe for sleeping in my canoe each night (hotel? forget it; that'd eat all of the profits; I want the adventure to be profitable too) and try being a bicycle messenger, just to show that it can be done without the red light running, etc. that messengers are infamous for. Finally, in 2007, I did the next best thing - getting this paper route, a strategy by which I figured I'd learn similar-to-messengering skills (the most-challenging-for-me one of which was the fast, back-to-back address-finding) without having to go any farther from home than Clarks Summit.
A key part of my motive (besides the money), both for the pipe dream and for this version thereof that I finally did, was to "get inside the heads of messengers" so as to be on a more credible pulpit from which to spout my promotions of how universally-applicable my Triadal principles are. And since I lived too far from "real" bicycle-messengering territory to infiltrate them, infiltrating paper carriers would have to do.
And here's what I found: When you're a paper carrier, the other paper carriers (all without even _calling_ their profession a brotherhood; this _blog_ is the only place where _that's_ done, and how much you want to bet bicycle messengers don't either; that too is probably only on the internet) stay behind you not only when you're waiting at a too-long, unnecessary red light. They stay behind you when you're going "only" 100% of the speed limit - which, on the 25 mph section of rt. 11 between the area of the distribution center and W. Grove, is otherwise unheard of.
Therefore, it would seem that this brotherhood of paper carriers (which constitutes the majority of the pre-dawn traffic approaching, from the shopping center where the distribution center is, the particular above-described stupid traffic signal) ought to have an unspoken system (and I think they do, except it seems that the CPA paper boy is exempt from it) of "drafting" each other through that signal:
In one example, if the signal is completely failing to detect a high pickup truck that day, a lower-sprung vehicle might eventually file in behind me and trip the signal for me; that's happened a number of times. In another example, when the signal _is_ detecting the first vehicle that comes along but taking, as always, two minutes to get around to turning green for it, then a vehicle that arrives second (such as myself yesterday) ought to be able to able to have a shorter wait because the vehicle in front has already made the signal start the two-minute countdown.
But did that happen yesterday? No! Not when the vehicle in front is driven by a CPA. The paper-boy CPA simply _ran_ the red light.
Leave it to a CPA.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Longest wait ever for front sections, and how I forgot to stick a few of them in
Yesterday, Sunday 1/25, the front sections didn't arrive at the distribution center until 5:00!
They're supposed to be there by 4ish. It's not uncommon for them to get there later than usual thereby monkeying us up (such as happened on 1/18), but I don't know if I recall them ever being later than 4:30 before, until yesterday. So, the way that they bungled it yesterday has earned itself a blog entry.
"The good news", as the Times' employee said to us as we were waiting, was that we'd therefore have until 8:30 (as opposed to the usual 7:30 deadline) to complete our deliveries. That meant that for the houses that we'd be delivering to between 7:30 and 8:30, we wouldn't have to worry about the $1.50 that, under normal conditions, the Times would clip us for each paper that a customer happens to call and report not having at their doorstep.
Well that's nice, but it's not the only thing.
"It'll still make me look bad", I remarked. Probably only a certain percentage of the customers who haven't gotten their paper by 7:30, call the Times to say so by 8:29. And even if that's a higher percentage than I think it is, all of those $1.50 charges would arguably still only be chump change compared to all of the _tips_ that I've gotten partly for _not_ being late (or at least not being late very often, at least not to any more than the very last street or two). Therefore, what I was mainly thinking about was how all of the customers on the whole last third of the route would simply _see_ me delivering late and perhaps think that I must have drank the night before or something.
Well in _another_ twist, I _had_ drunk the night before!
(It was with certain neighbors who invite me to do so, fortunately not very often. I was a teetaler until I was 28, and even today, when I'm by myself I can make a 30-pack last months. But this was one of the 30-pack-a-_day_ crowds that I had previously _told_ that I can't accept any more of the _Saturday_-night invitations of. They called me up anyhow - with friends like that, who needs enemies? - but, this time it just so happened that I had taken an amply long snooze on Saturday afternoon, plus I was two months behind on the inside dirt from this swamp-boundary faction of the neighbors; so, I accepted. Hmmm, time to see if I can get the caller ID working again.)
The hangover _might_ help explain why I forgot to stick a few of the front sections in.
Another factor (and the one that I prefer to use as my _official_ excuse) was that this was also the first Sunday of the Times' disappointing joining of the currently-popular-in-the-newspaper-industry, candy-bar-inflation trick of making its papers narrower. I think the resulting unfamiliar-to-me shape of the papers played a significant role in throwing me off, because I'm _very_ familiar with my big grey plastic containers when they're stuffed with bagged papers that are in the container vertically _and_ with the tops of them 1 1/2" closer to the top of the container than they were yesterday: It means, "Front sections not stuck in yet."
Plus, it's not very often that I stick the front sections in _during_ the delivery like I did yesterday, so I was out of practice in that connection. It seems that most carriers do it that way, but I largely stopped doing it that way after about the first half of 2007 when it dawned on me that I can save a whole bunch of idling by sticking all 180 of them in at the distribution center before leaving there.
In addition to saving a bunch of idling, I figured out equally early on that there are also several other advantages to having all of the papers assembled before leaving the distribution center. Right off the bat, it minimizes the disturbing of the people sleeping in the houses, because you're usually stopped directly in front of a house during the extra seconds that it takes to stick the front section in.
In early 2007 when I was still sticking them in while underway, I ameliorated that factor a little bit by sticking as many of them in as possible in the rare places along the route where I could stop without being directly in front of any house. The best such place - and I became a fixture there for several months - is just across the Morgan Highway from the route, near the library.
Speaking of that early-2007 period when I was a fixture at that spot, that was also the setting of one of the stories that, in "Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour", I promised to unleash about how "other elements of the ruling-of-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture were much quicker [than a certain snowplow driver] to get used to my presence therein". Here's that story:
Clarks Summit is thick with cops, and sure enough, it didn't take long for one of them to pull up to me to check me out as I was sitting there (near the library) sticking the front sections in. Both then, and a month or so earlier on Sunset when a cop did the same thing but even more briefly, the cops were satisfied the _instant_ they saw that I was handling a bunch of newspapers, and they promptly drove away.
I could have probably had an old _sticker_ (which, later, I _did_ for a while, with otherwise-surprising-for-Clarks-Summit impunity) and they wouldn't have looked long enough to notice it; that's how satisfied they were to simply see that I was a paper boy. Nor has any cop ever checked me out in the whole going-on-two-years since.
Clarks Summit cops leave paper carriers alone. They leave us alone even when we're doing screwball things like being on the left side of the road. Yesterday, I had just done at least _three_ violations, in full view of one (and at the pre-dawn hour that it still was, he didn't have anything other than me _to_ watch, during the whole half minute that I'd been doing them), when he drove right by me: I had operated on the left side of the road _at_ an _intersection_ (which in my opinion ought to make it count as two violations instead of one), _opened_ _federal_ _mailboxes_ (which, I was always taught, is a federal crime, although, for the handful of customers that specify that we do just that, I just assume that that's an exception), and failed to signal.
(I'm also a big promoter of _obeying_ traffic laws, especially at http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm , but I'll be doing enough spouting of that on this blog soon enough. Stay tuned.)
About once every several months, I happen to see a cop make a quick pass through the distribution center parking lot when many of us are there screwing around with our papers. I guess that's one of their various methodologies of keeping up with what the various carriers' vehicles look like so that they can leave them alone.
The only time that I attracted a cop enough for him to "really" check me out while I was doing anything having to do with the route, wasn't even during any delivery. Rather, it was in the middle of a weekday, in early February 2007, when I was mapping the route out by bike in preparation to do my first delivery that Sunday (as a substitute, which was how I started). I was taking _real_ long (peering at house numbers, stopping to take notes here and there, and then going back to double-check, etc.), which of course, on any suburban cul-de-sac where one is a stranger, was _asking_ to have a cop check me out. But it was fun: The cop instantly understood my explanation of what I was doing, and the rest of the conversation was about things like cycling which, as it turned out, was one of his hobbies, and where could he buy a headlight like mine, etc.
I've done the majority of my subsequent, more-detailed mappings out of the route (a sporadic, ongoing process) by foot, because I quickly learned that that's a much better speed for taking notes about house spacings, etc., than cycling speed.
So anyhow, I was boasting to y'all about how I ameliorated the extent to which I look like a marauder, by usually (since mid-2007) sticking all 180 of the front sections into the bags before leaving the distribution center.
The rare occasions when I don't, are generally when weather conditions are such that sitting in the cab of the pickup truck to stick them in (as opposed to standing outside, which I find more efficient) becomes tempting even for me.
And yesterday, with the temperature a little bit below 0 F, was one of those times. _Then_ it's _nice_ to wastefully idle the engine during the time of sticking them in!
Not that that factor alone was enough to give me any excuse, in my opinion, to do so. The addition, rather, of a substantial amount of wind, for example - even at much warmer temperatures - would have provided a more _valid_ excuse to not try to stick them in from standing outside (due to the requirement of wasting, above a certain wind speed, too much time and not-always-successful effort preventing the papers from becoming airplanes), but that excuse didn't happen yesterday either. It was only a _calm_ subzero temperature yesterday.
Rather, some additional factors - the ones that provided a _valid_ excuse - were introduced by the fact that the front sections arrived so late:
First, I've never tried to do arithmetic to figure out which of the two methodologies saves _time_. I've long suspected that my sticking-all-180-front-sections-in-before-starting method might take a hair longer, due to the fact that I'm theoretically handling each one of the papers an extra time (compared to if I were sticking each front section in right in the same fluid motion as when I'm grabbing that paper to run to a house with it - but it's probably unrealistic for that to very often all happen in such a fluid motion, hence my use of the word "theoretically").
(And most carriers, who use cars rather than pickup trucks, probably don't have _room_ in their vehicles for such extra shuffling of stuff around. I suspect that that - coupled with the fact that many of them are more willing than I am to do a whole bunch of idling of their engines, such as in particular, yesterday just to be warm while waiting the extra hour for the papers even though the distribution-center building that some of them finally came into to whine about the heat of is _very_ reasonably-well heated in my opinion! - might explain why most of them use the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method.)
I think I more or less discovered yesterday that the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method _isn't_ any iota faster, at least for me. The fact that I still took until about 8:33 to finish would seem to indicate this. Hmmm, maybe my theoretically-double-handling, normal method is just that - "theoretically" only, on the double-handling part - and my elimination, if any, of "double handling" yesterday was cancelled out by the simple awkwardness that I find in the position of sitting inside a vehicle (which requires swiveling back and forth 90 degrees to stick each front section in) as opposed to standing outside it to stick the front sections in.
My second deciding factor for using the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method yesterday, was to take advantage of the fact that getting the front sections late _didn't_ mean that I had to do all _parts_ of the route late. In particular, the route's one high-traffic street, W. Grove, is always wise to be finished with as early as possible, before traffic starts picking up and making it more time consuming to do. The same principle applies to when 7:30 rolls around: If I know that I'm not going to be finished the delivery yet when 7:30 rolls around, then it's ideal to save some of the front sections to stick in after 7:30 (thereby, _before_ 7:30, spending a little less time sticking sections in and more time delivering), because that way my embarrassment of finishing after 7:30 is confined to in front of a minimum number of the customers.
But, like I said, I _prefer_ sticking all of the front sections in before beginning the delivery. And a too-obvious-to-mention-in-any-of-the-above, additional advantage of doing so is - you guessed it! - it virtually eliminates all of the possible ways of _forgetting_ to stick one in.
Only about once that I happen to know of, had I ever forgotten to stick one in before yesterday. (It was in 2007 sometime, and I saw it on the Times' sheet the next weekend: A certain customer had "Sections A thru D missing." "A thru D" is the "front" section that I'm talking about.) But yesterday, I think there was around _14_ papers that I forgot to stick it into!
Fortunately, I caught myself just after 9 of them, so I knew which houses 9 of them probably were. But, being in a hurry as I was, I decided not to go right back to those 9 houses but rather, to wait until after finishing the delivery (when it'd be daylight also, a preferred time for making an otherwise-suspicious-looking _second_ visit to a house) to go back to them and deliver those front sections.
It was between about 8:33 and 8:45 when I finally did so; so, I must have looked _real_ incompetent: About half of those 9 customers had already taken their paper inside, so I had to putter around doing things like ringing their doorbells, with success only in some of the cases, to let them know that I'd finally "remembered" to bring their front section.
To top it off, one of them informed me that I'd forgotten his _whole_ paper! (I _think_ it was only at _that_ house that I was _that_ stupid, based on my lack, as usual, of any measurable number - besides one, which I gave him - of leftover inside sections.)
In that connection, I'm happy to report that it's been a long time since I've missed more than about one house every month or two and that it's usually been more like two months. Back when I was a newbie, I missed at least a couple of houses per average week.
I found out an hour later where it was that I'd forgotten one more of the front sections: The customer called my cellphone when, fortunately, I was still in town and could bring him one promptly. (I usually _am_ still in town for a long time after finishing the delivery, due to my McDonald's habit, and therefore, I like it when customers call me.)
I hereby apologize in advance to whatever 4 or so (based on the number of front sections that I had left over) customers it was that, as I'll learn in detail on the Times' sheet next weekend, I forgot to give front sections to. I hope that they called the Times, and that the managers delivered them as part of their routine cleanings-up after us bums.
I've often pipe dreamed about how, one of these times when I know that the front sections are going to be late, I could perhaps get a head start by delivering just the inside sections to a certain chunk of the route, and then come back later to deliver the front sections, with a goal of thereby delivering everything including the front sections within the deadline (because the front sections by themselves are much lighter and could therefore probably be delivered fast). But _if_ I were to ever try that, just one of the challenges that would be involved would be that I'd probably want to first print up a bunch of copies of a simple note, _saying_ what I'm doing, to stick into each inside section (that's just one of the disadvantages of this scheme: just sticking _these_ in would take a big chunk of time) so that early-rising customers would know that the front sections are on the way.
Speaking of the fat inside sections (which are available for carriers to prepare on Saturday): I usually just sit back in Lenoxville on Saturday and let my more-local-to-Clarks-Summit, Route Associate do that "getting tomorrow's paper today" part of the job, a big chunk of which must consist of worrying about when _those_ sections (frequently, the last I checked) arrive at the distribution center much later on _Saturday_ than they're supposed to.
They're supposed to be there by 4ish. It's not uncommon for them to get there later than usual thereby monkeying us up (such as happened on 1/18), but I don't know if I recall them ever being later than 4:30 before, until yesterday. So, the way that they bungled it yesterday has earned itself a blog entry.
"The good news", as the Times' employee said to us as we were waiting, was that we'd therefore have until 8:30 (as opposed to the usual 7:30 deadline) to complete our deliveries. That meant that for the houses that we'd be delivering to between 7:30 and 8:30, we wouldn't have to worry about the $1.50 that, under normal conditions, the Times would clip us for each paper that a customer happens to call and report not having at their doorstep.
Well that's nice, but it's not the only thing.
"It'll still make me look bad", I remarked. Probably only a certain percentage of the customers who haven't gotten their paper by 7:30, call the Times to say so by 8:29. And even if that's a higher percentage than I think it is, all of those $1.50 charges would arguably still only be chump change compared to all of the _tips_ that I've gotten partly for _not_ being late (or at least not being late very often, at least not to any more than the very last street or two). Therefore, what I was mainly thinking about was how all of the customers on the whole last third of the route would simply _see_ me delivering late and perhaps think that I must have drank the night before or something.
Well in _another_ twist, I _had_ drunk the night before!
(It was with certain neighbors who invite me to do so, fortunately not very often. I was a teetaler until I was 28, and even today, when I'm by myself I can make a 30-pack last months. But this was one of the 30-pack-a-_day_ crowds that I had previously _told_ that I can't accept any more of the _Saturday_-night invitations of. They called me up anyhow - with friends like that, who needs enemies? - but, this time it just so happened that I had taken an amply long snooze on Saturday afternoon, plus I was two months behind on the inside dirt from this swamp-boundary faction of the neighbors; so, I accepted. Hmmm, time to see if I can get the caller ID working again.)
The hangover _might_ help explain why I forgot to stick a few of the front sections in.
Another factor (and the one that I prefer to use as my _official_ excuse) was that this was also the first Sunday of the Times' disappointing joining of the currently-popular-in-the-newspaper-industry, candy-bar-inflation trick of making its papers narrower. I think the resulting unfamiliar-to-me shape of the papers played a significant role in throwing me off, because I'm _very_ familiar with my big grey plastic containers when they're stuffed with bagged papers that are in the container vertically _and_ with the tops of them 1 1/2" closer to the top of the container than they were yesterday: It means, "Front sections not stuck in yet."
Plus, it's not very often that I stick the front sections in _during_ the delivery like I did yesterday, so I was out of practice in that connection. It seems that most carriers do it that way, but I largely stopped doing it that way after about the first half of 2007 when it dawned on me that I can save a whole bunch of idling by sticking all 180 of them in at the distribution center before leaving there.
In addition to saving a bunch of idling, I figured out equally early on that there are also several other advantages to having all of the papers assembled before leaving the distribution center. Right off the bat, it minimizes the disturbing of the people sleeping in the houses, because you're usually stopped directly in front of a house during the extra seconds that it takes to stick the front section in.
In early 2007 when I was still sticking them in while underway, I ameliorated that factor a little bit by sticking as many of them in as possible in the rare places along the route where I could stop without being directly in front of any house. The best such place - and I became a fixture there for several months - is just across the Morgan Highway from the route, near the library.
Speaking of that early-2007 period when I was a fixture at that spot, that was also the setting of one of the stories that, in "Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour", I promised to unleash about how "other elements of the ruling-of-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture were much quicker [than a certain snowplow driver] to get used to my presence therein". Here's that story:
Clarks Summit is thick with cops, and sure enough, it didn't take long for one of them to pull up to me to check me out as I was sitting there (near the library) sticking the front sections in. Both then, and a month or so earlier on Sunset when a cop did the same thing but even more briefly, the cops were satisfied the _instant_ they saw that I was handling a bunch of newspapers, and they promptly drove away.
I could have probably had an old _sticker_ (which, later, I _did_ for a while, with otherwise-surprising-for-Clarks-Summit impunity) and they wouldn't have looked long enough to notice it; that's how satisfied they were to simply see that I was a paper boy. Nor has any cop ever checked me out in the whole going-on-two-years since.
Clarks Summit cops leave paper carriers alone. They leave us alone even when we're doing screwball things like being on the left side of the road. Yesterday, I had just done at least _three_ violations, in full view of one (and at the pre-dawn hour that it still was, he didn't have anything other than me _to_ watch, during the whole half minute that I'd been doing them), when he drove right by me: I had operated on the left side of the road _at_ an _intersection_ (which in my opinion ought to make it count as two violations instead of one), _opened_ _federal_ _mailboxes_ (which, I was always taught, is a federal crime, although, for the handful of customers that specify that we do just that, I just assume that that's an exception), and failed to signal.
(I'm also a big promoter of _obeying_ traffic laws, especially at http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm , but I'll be doing enough spouting of that on this blog soon enough. Stay tuned.)
About once every several months, I happen to see a cop make a quick pass through the distribution center parking lot when many of us are there screwing around with our papers. I guess that's one of their various methodologies of keeping up with what the various carriers' vehicles look like so that they can leave them alone.
The only time that I attracted a cop enough for him to "really" check me out while I was doing anything having to do with the route, wasn't even during any delivery. Rather, it was in the middle of a weekday, in early February 2007, when I was mapping the route out by bike in preparation to do my first delivery that Sunday (as a substitute, which was how I started). I was taking _real_ long (peering at house numbers, stopping to take notes here and there, and then going back to double-check, etc.), which of course, on any suburban cul-de-sac where one is a stranger, was _asking_ to have a cop check me out. But it was fun: The cop instantly understood my explanation of what I was doing, and the rest of the conversation was about things like cycling which, as it turned out, was one of his hobbies, and where could he buy a headlight like mine, etc.
I've done the majority of my subsequent, more-detailed mappings out of the route (a sporadic, ongoing process) by foot, because I quickly learned that that's a much better speed for taking notes about house spacings, etc., than cycling speed.
So anyhow, I was boasting to y'all about how I ameliorated the extent to which I look like a marauder, by usually (since mid-2007) sticking all 180 of the front sections into the bags before leaving the distribution center.
The rare occasions when I don't, are generally when weather conditions are such that sitting in the cab of the pickup truck to stick them in (as opposed to standing outside, which I find more efficient) becomes tempting even for me.
And yesterday, with the temperature a little bit below 0 F, was one of those times. _Then_ it's _nice_ to wastefully idle the engine during the time of sticking them in!
Not that that factor alone was enough to give me any excuse, in my opinion, to do so. The addition, rather, of a substantial amount of wind, for example - even at much warmer temperatures - would have provided a more _valid_ excuse to not try to stick them in from standing outside (due to the requirement of wasting, above a certain wind speed, too much time and not-always-successful effort preventing the papers from becoming airplanes), but that excuse didn't happen yesterday either. It was only a _calm_ subzero temperature yesterday.
Rather, some additional factors - the ones that provided a _valid_ excuse - were introduced by the fact that the front sections arrived so late:
First, I've never tried to do arithmetic to figure out which of the two methodologies saves _time_. I've long suspected that my sticking-all-180-front-sections-in-before-starting method might take a hair longer, due to the fact that I'm theoretically handling each one of the papers an extra time (compared to if I were sticking each front section in right in the same fluid motion as when I'm grabbing that paper to run to a house with it - but it's probably unrealistic for that to very often all happen in such a fluid motion, hence my use of the word "theoretically").
(And most carriers, who use cars rather than pickup trucks, probably don't have _room_ in their vehicles for such extra shuffling of stuff around. I suspect that that - coupled with the fact that many of them are more willing than I am to do a whole bunch of idling of their engines, such as in particular, yesterday just to be warm while waiting the extra hour for the papers even though the distribution-center building that some of them finally came into to whine about the heat of is _very_ reasonably-well heated in my opinion! - might explain why most of them use the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method.)
I think I more or less discovered yesterday that the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method _isn't_ any iota faster, at least for me. The fact that I still took until about 8:33 to finish would seem to indicate this. Hmmm, maybe my theoretically-double-handling, normal method is just that - "theoretically" only, on the double-handling part - and my elimination, if any, of "double handling" yesterday was cancelled out by the simple awkwardness that I find in the position of sitting inside a vehicle (which requires swiveling back and forth 90 degrees to stick each front section in) as opposed to standing outside it to stick the front sections in.
My second deciding factor for using the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method yesterday, was to take advantage of the fact that getting the front sections late _didn't_ mean that I had to do all _parts_ of the route late. In particular, the route's one high-traffic street, W. Grove, is always wise to be finished with as early as possible, before traffic starts picking up and making it more time consuming to do. The same principle applies to when 7:30 rolls around: If I know that I'm not going to be finished the delivery yet when 7:30 rolls around, then it's ideal to save some of the front sections to stick in after 7:30 (thereby, _before_ 7:30, spending a little less time sticking sections in and more time delivering), because that way my embarrassment of finishing after 7:30 is confined to in front of a minimum number of the customers.
But, like I said, I _prefer_ sticking all of the front sections in before beginning the delivery. And a too-obvious-to-mention-in-any-of-the-above, additional advantage of doing so is - you guessed it! - it virtually eliminates all of the possible ways of _forgetting_ to stick one in.
Only about once that I happen to know of, had I ever forgotten to stick one in before yesterday. (It was in 2007 sometime, and I saw it on the Times' sheet the next weekend: A certain customer had "Sections A thru D missing." "A thru D" is the "front" section that I'm talking about.) But yesterday, I think there was around _14_ papers that I forgot to stick it into!
Fortunately, I caught myself just after 9 of them, so I knew which houses 9 of them probably were. But, being in a hurry as I was, I decided not to go right back to those 9 houses but rather, to wait until after finishing the delivery (when it'd be daylight also, a preferred time for making an otherwise-suspicious-looking _second_ visit to a house) to go back to them and deliver those front sections.
It was between about 8:33 and 8:45 when I finally did so; so, I must have looked _real_ incompetent: About half of those 9 customers had already taken their paper inside, so I had to putter around doing things like ringing their doorbells, with success only in some of the cases, to let them know that I'd finally "remembered" to bring their front section.
To top it off, one of them informed me that I'd forgotten his _whole_ paper! (I _think_ it was only at _that_ house that I was _that_ stupid, based on my lack, as usual, of any measurable number - besides one, which I gave him - of leftover inside sections.)
In that connection, I'm happy to report that it's been a long time since I've missed more than about one house every month or two and that it's usually been more like two months. Back when I was a newbie, I missed at least a couple of houses per average week.
I found out an hour later where it was that I'd forgotten one more of the front sections: The customer called my cellphone when, fortunately, I was still in town and could bring him one promptly. (I usually _am_ still in town for a long time after finishing the delivery, due to my McDonald's habit, and therefore, I like it when customers call me.)
I hereby apologize in advance to whatever 4 or so (based on the number of front sections that I had left over) customers it was that, as I'll learn in detail on the Times' sheet next weekend, I forgot to give front sections to. I hope that they called the Times, and that the managers delivered them as part of their routine cleanings-up after us bums.
I've often pipe dreamed about how, one of these times when I know that the front sections are going to be late, I could perhaps get a head start by delivering just the inside sections to a certain chunk of the route, and then come back later to deliver the front sections, with a goal of thereby delivering everything including the front sections within the deadline (because the front sections by themselves are much lighter and could therefore probably be delivered fast). But _if_ I were to ever try that, just one of the challenges that would be involved would be that I'd probably want to first print up a bunch of copies of a simple note, _saying_ what I'm doing, to stick into each inside section (that's just one of the disadvantages of this scheme: just sticking _these_ in would take a big chunk of time) so that early-rising customers would know that the front sections are on the way.
Speaking of the fat inside sections (which are available for carriers to prepare on Saturday): I usually just sit back in Lenoxville on Saturday and let my more-local-to-Clarks-Summit, Route Associate do that "getting tomorrow's paper today" part of the job, a big chunk of which must consist of worrying about when _those_ sections (frequently, the last I checked) arrive at the distribution center much later on _Saturday_ than they're supposed to.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour!
No potshot at snowplow drivers is intended in the above title, except to the extent that I happen to be using one of them as the butt of my sociological observation for the day. I thank snowplow drivers for the much-more-cleared-than-expected surfaces that helped me finish not _too_ embarrassingly late this morning.
The "than expected" part, incidentally, was due to the fact that we only got perhaps 3 inches between yesterday afternoon and the delivery time this morning, instead of the 6 to 10 that everybody including this blog had been predicting.
The fodder for the following sociological observation happened as I was preparing to do the closest-to-Sunset half of the main section of Sleepy Hollow by foot.
This morning, I was, for the time being, back to not having the bike along. I'd left it at home because it was broke down.
The freewheel of it had started to fall apart, and I'd waited until the last minute to try yanking another one off of one of the umpteen bike wheels that I've got lying around. At 11 pm last night, I gave up on that after a few minutes, when the fact stared me straight in the face that getting some iota of sleep before the delivery was more important.
Nor did I try any iota to fulfill my pipe dream of bringing X-C skis along (it'd probably take a lot more snow for them to become advantageous for even one segment).
So anyhow, this morning, I was doing Sleepy Hollow (or to nitpick, the "main" section of it, i.e. the section that parallels Woodland Way) the way that I'd been most routinely doing it for basically the second half of 2008: I come in off the Morgan Highway (after doing W. Grove), do several houses by motoring on my way in to the Woodland Way splitoff, and then: Just before and just after doing Woodland Way by motoring, I do the "main" section of Sleepy Hollow (which has about 16 subscribers) by foot by doing an 8-paper armload from either end.
This requires (unlike the cycling method that I boasted about earlier for this whole Sleepy-Hollow-to-Hilltop neighborhood) doing at least some motoring north along Sunset after Woodland Way, so as to be incidentally cruising past an efficient parking spot from which to walk onto the half of Sleepy Hollow closest to Sunset and do that second 8-paper armload for Sleepy Hollow. (I do all this on my way to a still-further-north-on-Sunset parking spot from which to do _Hilltop_ in _one_ walk. I do that one with a shoulder-bag-full in _addition_ to an armload, because it's a 15-subscriber dead-end).
Be patient; I'm getting to the "sociological observation" part: This morning, just after I'd finished Woodland Way and as I was approaching the spot on Sunset where I park to do the second Sleepy-Hollow 8-paper armload, I observed - in front of me a couple hundred feet further north on Sunset - a snowplow going back and forth by backing up, each time, to closer and closer to where I was. So, just for in case he might want to eventually come all the way back and plow a little looking-like-it-needed-plowing area where I was parking, I decided to only run to _one_ house on Sleepy Hollow, namely the one closest to where was parking, and then reluctantly motor a little bit into Sleepy Hollow to park and run to the other 7 houses. That way I'd be giving the snowplow driver a maximum number of options of places to expand his plowing operation into while I'm doing the 7 houses, without my pickup truck being in his way.
Well, after I did the above-mentioned one house and was getting back in to begin motoring to my more-accommodating-of-him parking spot, he _did_ back the whole rest of the distance back to where I'd parked.
Except, as I would soon deduce, his reason for backing up there wasn't to plow that area. Nor did he do any plowing in Sleepy Hollow, which he followed me a couple hundred feet or so into. Nor did he do any plowing in the driveway that he finally turned around in to go back to Sunset and mind his own business - after, as I'd by then deduced, watching me all that time expecting to perhaps catch a marauder.
Well here's the story of how his expectation to see me remove something from somebody's property was self-fulfilling:
It was entertaining to watch how the time that he picked to do his longest-duration single closer-to-zero-than-three mph (obviously-watching-of-me-with-his-headlights - as if a thief, even if there _are_ any that aren't going to _bed_ by this last hour before dawn, would conduct his profession under the glare of headlights!) segment of his little diversion, was as I was picking up six objects and removing them from somebody's property.
He _hadn't_ seen me _drop_ those same objects there 20 or so seconds earlier. Therefore, as he watched me pick them up, remove them from that property and go to the next property with them (my mode for the first few feet of which was by aerobic-walking, ala Mort Malkin - being careful not to transition too quickly into my preferred-in-such-lightly-loaded-situations modes, namely jogging or running - due to the need for caution regarding the concept of "suicide by busybody"), it must have taken him a while to see that those six objects were papers and that I was a paper boy.
Needless to say, that busybodying snowplow driver was probably the _reason_ that I dropped those papers _and_ did several other things that must have made it be, overall, quite a show for him. Such as: I forgot about the presence of a 3' drop-off as I was running from that property onto the next (the only time in my going-on-two-years of running across this route's various stone walls that I ever fell while doing so; so, go figure).
I'll save the several older stories for until I get around to unleashing them sometime, about how much faster other elements of the ruling-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture got used to my presence therein.
The "than expected" part, incidentally, was due to the fact that we only got perhaps 3 inches between yesterday afternoon and the delivery time this morning, instead of the 6 to 10 that everybody including this blog had been predicting.
The fodder for the following sociological observation happened as I was preparing to do the closest-to-Sunset half of the main section of Sleepy Hollow by foot.
This morning, I was, for the time being, back to not having the bike along. I'd left it at home because it was broke down.
The freewheel of it had started to fall apart, and I'd waited until the last minute to try yanking another one off of one of the umpteen bike wheels that I've got lying around. At 11 pm last night, I gave up on that after a few minutes, when the fact stared me straight in the face that getting some iota of sleep before the delivery was more important.
Nor did I try any iota to fulfill my pipe dream of bringing X-C skis along (it'd probably take a lot more snow for them to become advantageous for even one segment).
So anyhow, this morning, I was doing Sleepy Hollow (or to nitpick, the "main" section of it, i.e. the section that parallels Woodland Way) the way that I'd been most routinely doing it for basically the second half of 2008: I come in off the Morgan Highway (after doing W. Grove), do several houses by motoring on my way in to the Woodland Way splitoff, and then: Just before and just after doing Woodland Way by motoring, I do the "main" section of Sleepy Hollow (which has about 16 subscribers) by foot by doing an 8-paper armload from either end.
This requires (unlike the cycling method that I boasted about earlier for this whole Sleepy-Hollow-to-Hilltop neighborhood) doing at least some motoring north along Sunset after Woodland Way, so as to be incidentally cruising past an efficient parking spot from which to walk onto the half of Sleepy Hollow closest to Sunset and do that second 8-paper armload for Sleepy Hollow. (I do all this on my way to a still-further-north-on-Sunset parking spot from which to do _Hilltop_ in _one_ walk. I do that one with a shoulder-bag-full in _addition_ to an armload, because it's a 15-subscriber dead-end).
Be patient; I'm getting to the "sociological observation" part: This morning, just after I'd finished Woodland Way and as I was approaching the spot on Sunset where I park to do the second Sleepy-Hollow 8-paper armload, I observed - in front of me a couple hundred feet further north on Sunset - a snowplow going back and forth by backing up, each time, to closer and closer to where I was. So, just for in case he might want to eventually come all the way back and plow a little looking-like-it-needed-plowing area where I was parking, I decided to only run to _one_ house on Sleepy Hollow, namely the one closest to where was parking, and then reluctantly motor a little bit into Sleepy Hollow to park and run to the other 7 houses. That way I'd be giving the snowplow driver a maximum number of options of places to expand his plowing operation into while I'm doing the 7 houses, without my pickup truck being in his way.
Well, after I did the above-mentioned one house and was getting back in to begin motoring to my more-accommodating-of-him parking spot, he _did_ back the whole rest of the distance back to where I'd parked.
Except, as I would soon deduce, his reason for backing up there wasn't to plow that area. Nor did he do any plowing in Sleepy Hollow, which he followed me a couple hundred feet or so into. Nor did he do any plowing in the driveway that he finally turned around in to go back to Sunset and mind his own business - after, as I'd by then deduced, watching me all that time expecting to perhaps catch a marauder.
Well here's the story of how his expectation to see me remove something from somebody's property was self-fulfilling:
It was entertaining to watch how the time that he picked to do his longest-duration single closer-to-zero-than-three mph (obviously-watching-of-me-with-his-headlights - as if a thief, even if there _are_ any that aren't going to _bed_ by this last hour before dawn, would conduct his profession under the glare of headlights!) segment of his little diversion, was as I was picking up six objects and removing them from somebody's property.
He _hadn't_ seen me _drop_ those same objects there 20 or so seconds earlier. Therefore, as he watched me pick them up, remove them from that property and go to the next property with them (my mode for the first few feet of which was by aerobic-walking, ala Mort Malkin - being careful not to transition too quickly into my preferred-in-such-lightly-loaded-situations modes, namely jogging or running - due to the need for caution regarding the concept of "suicide by busybody"), it must have taken him a while to see that those six objects were papers and that I was a paper boy.
Needless to say, that busybodying snowplow driver was probably the _reason_ that I dropped those papers _and_ did several other things that must have made it be, overall, quite a show for him. Such as: I forgot about the presence of a 3' drop-off as I was running from that property onto the next (the only time in my going-on-two-years of running across this route's various stone walls that I ever fell while doing so; so, go figure).
I'll save the several older stories for until I get around to unleashing them sometime, about how much faster other elements of the ruling-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture got used to my presence therein.
Friday, January 9, 2009
6 to 10
...and the virtually-guaranteeing-of-no-cleared-surfaces timing of it: _Ending_ around 7 am Sunday!
If that prediction from the weathermen is correct, this should be one of the most bonafide "teahounds need not apply" deliveries yet. Hmmm, I wonder if I should get out the cross-country skis...
If that prediction from the weathermen is correct, this should be one of the most bonafide "teahounds need not apply" deliveries yet. Hmmm, I wonder if I should get out the cross-country skis...
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Sunday 1/4/09 Delivery Report
I'm happy to report success in adhering to my New Year's resolution of beginning to more aggressively increase the percentage of the delivery that I do by bike. This morning, out of 183 active subscribers' houses, I did 75 by bike, in 5 bikeloads launched from the pickup truck at 3 points along the route as follows:
From parking spot #1 (on W. Grove between Woodside & Woodridge, parked there from 5:08 to 5:26):
Bikeload #1, Woodridge & north slope of Woodside, 13 papers.
From parking spot #2 (near PennDOT building; parked there from 5:31 to 6:04):
Bikeload #2, Wildwood (& adjacent part of W. Grove) & Sunset, 13 papers.
Bikeload #3, Vosburg, 18 papers.
From parking spot #3 (intersection of Sleepy Hollow and Woodland Way; parked there from 6:15 to 6:48):
Bikeload #4, Sleepy Hollow east of the parking spot, 16 papers.
Bikeload #5, Hilltop, 15 papers.
That's the highest percentage of this route that I've delivered to by bike yet. The closest that I'd gotten to delivering to that many streets by bike before had been the time in September that I boasted about in "About the name of this blog". That time, I'd only done 4 of those approximate bikeloads (specifically, the ones that I call bikeloads #2 thru #5 above), and one of the several reasons that I didn't bring my bike again until 12/21 was that I'd parked in a poor spot in September to do Vosburg & Sunset; the existence of a good parking place near Vosburg & Sunset hadn't yet dawned on me.
An ideal motor-vehicle parking spot on a paper route such as this ("parking", to a paper carrier, meaning parking long enough to shut off the engine and do more than, say, 6 houses by a non-motorized mode) is:
1) One where you're not too directly in front of any house, so as not to disturb people. Such spots are rare on this route.
2) One that minimizes the route's motoring milage by not being a ways into a branch of the route that you're doing by a non-motorized mode.
But in early December, it finally dawned on me that there _is_ a good parking place near Vosburg, and it didn't take long at all after that for a nice improved version of the _whole_ logistical puzzle to fit together. In particular, it dawned on me that with this good parking spot in _addition_ to the other ones, I'd only need carrying capacity on my bike for 15 or so, not 25 or more, papers. And that helped inspire me to finally get off my duff and build such capacity onto one of my spare bikes.
The spare bike that I fixed up in time for the 12/21 delivery and will probably keep on using on the deliveries, is a 1980s-or-so Kabuki Bridgestone that Phil Pass gave me a few years ago. For front panniers, I zapped up, with a Sawzall (the saber saw would have been more precise but I couldn't find it; it was already Sunday 12/21 and my 3 am departure time was looming), two of the Yaffa plastic file boxes that I'd bought at Wegman's a few years ago, and bolted them onto the front rack (with the strongest part, which had been the bottom, in).
I cut each one of them to a size and shape that would allow quick insertion of either a few papers loose, or a plastic cat-litter container with a few papers in it. That way, to facilitate loading the bike without having to spend time handling the papers more than the one time that I handle them while sticking the front sections into all of them at the distribution center, I load, _while_ sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, one load loose in the butchered Yaffa boxes, plus a whole bunch of "refill cartridges" consisting of cat-litter-container loads.
The number of papers in each front pannier, based on the size of the papers on an average Sunday, will probably be 5 in a cat-litter container or 6 loose in the butchered Yaffa box (I toyed around for many months sticking average-size Sunday papers into various such types of containers before getting around to putting a version on a bike). But for the short time that I've been actually bringing the bike along on the delivery, the papers have been smaller than usual, so it's been more like 6 and 7.
The decision of how much payload capacity to have on the rear, was made _for_ me when I noticed that this bike has a shorter wheelbase than I'm used to having (that's part of the reason I chose it to fix up as my paper-delivery bike: it can turn around on a short radius at the top of driveways, etc.), and that therefore, too big of a container of papers on the rear would have too much of its weight aft of the rear axle. Well, with my just-hatched plan of how I wouldn't _need_ to carry that big of loads _anyhow_, this was no problem! I simply dug out a pair of "real" rear panniers (i.e. bought'n ones) that my brother-in-law had given me a few months ago. These accommodate the carrying, with the weight _not_ too far to the rear, of 2 (average-size) or 3 or 4 (the size that they've been for about the last 3 Sundays) papers on each side of the rear wheel.
The time that the _whole_ delivery took this morning (and the way that I measure it anymore is starting from leaving the distribution center with all of the front sections stuck into the bags), was from 4:49 to 7:39.
Oops, I finished 9 minutes later than you're supposed to; how embarrassing. Well that's why I'm not trying yet to do more streets by bike than I am. I _think_ that this system, done right, can be as fast or faster than the motoring-and-running system, but I'm not sure exactly. And _if_ it's even a little bit slower (in which case I'd still advocate it, because for example, it helps vary what muscle groups you use), then I want to only do it when I start early enough, etc. so as not to give cycling a bad name.
But there's plenty of room for improvement: Right off the bat, notice that I wasted time noting the times. That'll add a minute every time.
Then some minutes could no doubt be shaved off by reducing the size of bikeload #2 by 3 papers and bikeload #4 by 2 papers, and adding those 5 papers to bikeload #5. That'd make bikeload #5 a big load, but it'd knock a few hundred feet off the one substantial requiring-of-extra-bike-rides-along-it-just-to-get-another-load stretch (namely Sleepy Hollow and the part of Sunset between Sleepy Hollow and Hilltop).
Simply parking near Hilltop instead of at the far end of Sleepy Hollow, to do Hilltop, would be another way to eliminate the above backtracking problem, and parking near Hilltop is what I did for most of the last year or however long ago it was that I started usually doing Hilltop by foot. However, with cycling, not just Hilltop but this _whole_ general part of the route can be done without motoring, and therefore, "ideal-parking-spot factor #2" above (i.e. not wasting unnecessary motor travel to get to the parking spot; the nearest "necessary" motoring is along Woodland Way because that moves the load towards the next part of the route, namely Grandview, via Oakmont) comes into play.
My pipe dream that I boasted about earlier of building an instant-launch device (instant launching of the bike from the pickup truck, that is) seems to be continuing to take me a while to get around to doing. The time consumption of unloading the bike from the pickup truck and then loading it back on after doing each set of bikeloads, is considerable, but for now, it's less unacceptable than I thought it would be. It seems to get ameliorated by the fact that I've limited the number of bike-launch sites so as to, in the case of two of the three parking spots, do more than one bikeload per parking spot.
But stay tuned, because I have it mapped out how to do more like 130 of the houses in 8 bikeloads, whenever I get all these time-consumption kinks worked out.
From parking spot #1 (on W. Grove between Woodside & Woodridge, parked there from 5:08 to 5:26):
Bikeload #1, Woodridge & north slope of Woodside, 13 papers.
From parking spot #2 (near PennDOT building; parked there from 5:31 to 6:04):
Bikeload #2, Wildwood (& adjacent part of W. Grove) & Sunset, 13 papers.
Bikeload #3, Vosburg, 18 papers.
From parking spot #3 (intersection of Sleepy Hollow and Woodland Way; parked there from 6:15 to 6:48):
Bikeload #4, Sleepy Hollow east of the parking spot, 16 papers.
Bikeload #5, Hilltop, 15 papers.
That's the highest percentage of this route that I've delivered to by bike yet. The closest that I'd gotten to delivering to that many streets by bike before had been the time in September that I boasted about in "About the name of this blog". That time, I'd only done 4 of those approximate bikeloads (specifically, the ones that I call bikeloads #2 thru #5 above), and one of the several reasons that I didn't bring my bike again until 12/21 was that I'd parked in a poor spot in September to do Vosburg & Sunset; the existence of a good parking place near Vosburg & Sunset hadn't yet dawned on me.
An ideal motor-vehicle parking spot on a paper route such as this ("parking", to a paper carrier, meaning parking long enough to shut off the engine and do more than, say, 6 houses by a non-motorized mode) is:
1) One where you're not too directly in front of any house, so as not to disturb people. Such spots are rare on this route.
2) One that minimizes the route's motoring milage by not being a ways into a branch of the route that you're doing by a non-motorized mode.
But in early December, it finally dawned on me that there _is_ a good parking place near Vosburg, and it didn't take long at all after that for a nice improved version of the _whole_ logistical puzzle to fit together. In particular, it dawned on me that with this good parking spot in _addition_ to the other ones, I'd only need carrying capacity on my bike for 15 or so, not 25 or more, papers. And that helped inspire me to finally get off my duff and build such capacity onto one of my spare bikes.
The spare bike that I fixed up in time for the 12/21 delivery and will probably keep on using on the deliveries, is a 1980s-or-so Kabuki Bridgestone that Phil Pass gave me a few years ago. For front panniers, I zapped up, with a Sawzall (the saber saw would have been more precise but I couldn't find it; it was already Sunday 12/21 and my 3 am departure time was looming), two of the Yaffa plastic file boxes that I'd bought at Wegman's a few years ago, and bolted them onto the front rack (with the strongest part, which had been the bottom, in).
I cut each one of them to a size and shape that would allow quick insertion of either a few papers loose, or a plastic cat-litter container with a few papers in it. That way, to facilitate loading the bike without having to spend time handling the papers more than the one time that I handle them while sticking the front sections into all of them at the distribution center, I load, _while_ sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, one load loose in the butchered Yaffa boxes, plus a whole bunch of "refill cartridges" consisting of cat-litter-container loads.
The number of papers in each front pannier, based on the size of the papers on an average Sunday, will probably be 5 in a cat-litter container or 6 loose in the butchered Yaffa box (I toyed around for many months sticking average-size Sunday papers into various such types of containers before getting around to putting a version on a bike). But for the short time that I've been actually bringing the bike along on the delivery, the papers have been smaller than usual, so it's been more like 6 and 7.
The decision of how much payload capacity to have on the rear, was made _for_ me when I noticed that this bike has a shorter wheelbase than I'm used to having (that's part of the reason I chose it to fix up as my paper-delivery bike: it can turn around on a short radius at the top of driveways, etc.), and that therefore, too big of a container of papers on the rear would have too much of its weight aft of the rear axle. Well, with my just-hatched plan of how I wouldn't _need_ to carry that big of loads _anyhow_, this was no problem! I simply dug out a pair of "real" rear panniers (i.e. bought'n ones) that my brother-in-law had given me a few months ago. These accommodate the carrying, with the weight _not_ too far to the rear, of 2 (average-size) or 3 or 4 (the size that they've been for about the last 3 Sundays) papers on each side of the rear wheel.
The time that the _whole_ delivery took this morning (and the way that I measure it anymore is starting from leaving the distribution center with all of the front sections stuck into the bags), was from 4:49 to 7:39.
Oops, I finished 9 minutes later than you're supposed to; how embarrassing. Well that's why I'm not trying yet to do more streets by bike than I am. I _think_ that this system, done right, can be as fast or faster than the motoring-and-running system, but I'm not sure exactly. And _if_ it's even a little bit slower (in which case I'd still advocate it, because for example, it helps vary what muscle groups you use), then I want to only do it when I start early enough, etc. so as not to give cycling a bad name.
But there's plenty of room for improvement: Right off the bat, notice that I wasted time noting the times. That'll add a minute every time.
Then some minutes could no doubt be shaved off by reducing the size of bikeload #2 by 3 papers and bikeload #4 by 2 papers, and adding those 5 papers to bikeload #5. That'd make bikeload #5 a big load, but it'd knock a few hundred feet off the one substantial requiring-of-extra-bike-rides-along-it-just-to-get-another-load stretch (namely Sleepy Hollow and the part of Sunset between Sleepy Hollow and Hilltop).
Simply parking near Hilltop instead of at the far end of Sleepy Hollow, to do Hilltop, would be another way to eliminate the above backtracking problem, and parking near Hilltop is what I did for most of the last year or however long ago it was that I started usually doing Hilltop by foot. However, with cycling, not just Hilltop but this _whole_ general part of the route can be done without motoring, and therefore, "ideal-parking-spot factor #2" above (i.e. not wasting unnecessary motor travel to get to the parking spot; the nearest "necessary" motoring is along Woodland Way because that moves the load towards the next part of the route, namely Grandview, via Oakmont) comes into play.
My pipe dream that I boasted about earlier of building an instant-launch device (instant launching of the bike from the pickup truck, that is) seems to be continuing to take me a while to get around to doing. The time consumption of unloading the bike from the pickup truck and then loading it back on after doing each set of bikeloads, is considerable, but for now, it's less unacceptable than I thought it would be. It seems to get ameliorated by the fact that I've limited the number of bike-launch sites so as to, in the case of two of the three parking spots, do more than one bikeload per parking spot.
But stay tuned, because I have it mapped out how to do more like 130 of the houses in 8 bikeloads, whenever I get all these time-consumption kinks worked out.
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