...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...
Friday, January 9, 2009
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.
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Another time-travel tale
This New Year's will be the 8th anniversary of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century, and no anniversary of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century would be complete without a time-travel tale that at least attempts to be comparable to the one in which, by simply making the first of a whimsical pair of u-turns with my time-traveling iron steed, I visited 2000 subsequent in time to 2001. That Einstein-defying stunt seemed to heat the Yukon up to double digits in January.
I'm happy to report that I have one for this New Year's: Yesterday morning, I seemed to visit Sunday, 12/28, subsequent in time to Monday, 12/29!
My cellphone rang at 2:50 am, and I thought, "Hmmm, who would be calling in the middle of the night on my _cellphone_!? A) I'm not _substituting_ on this Sunday paper route anymore, and even if I was, it's Monday morning now, not Sunday morning. B) All of the handful of _other_ people who might ever call me in the middle of the night are - partly _by_ _definition_ - not the people who have my cellphone number!"
But I answered it, and what did it turn out to be, but my event reminder telling me that it's 3am "Sunday" and therefore time "4" my paper route.
This was very weird, because for the whole year and a half since I'd discovered how to use this event-reminder feature of my new cellphone, I'd been _religiously_ following that just-before-3am-Sunday timeframe as the time to _always_ be getting ready to do my weekly paperboying. So, although I was tired enough that under normal circumstances I would have gone _right_ back to sleep, I didn't.
Even when I'm on a bike or canoe trip sleeping in the woods near a railroad and the sound of an approaching train wakes me up, my brain's checking and re-checking of the "Am I on the tracks?" consideration only keeps me awake for a minute, if that. (Or two minutes maybe, in the case of my _non_-stopping-for-the-night canoeing days in 1975, when I _was_ in the path of barges that I had to sit up and paddle out of the way of.)
But in this case, it took me an _hour_ to go back to sleep, because, having traveled back in time _before_, I was considering _every_ _angle_ of, "Am I _sure_ that 12/28 is in the _past_? I remember it, and the delivery that I completed on it, very distinctly; however, am I _sure_ that there isn't some _other_ time-warp possibility of how 12/28 could perhaps happen a second time - and for Sunday carriers to be expected to show up and do a repeat 12/28 delivery - subsequent in time to 12/29?"
In conclusion, I feel vindicated now for being one of the last non-users of cellphones; I detested them and didn't knuckle under and get one until I became a paper boy. (They _are_ admittedly useful for a specific purpose such as that.) I think wierd things are _generally_ starting to happen with my cellphone, because a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to _call_ two of the numbers that were in my directory on it, plus several randomly-generated numbers, all by itself!
I'm happy to report that I have one for this New Year's: Yesterday morning, I seemed to visit Sunday, 12/28, subsequent in time to Monday, 12/29!
My cellphone rang at 2:50 am, and I thought, "Hmmm, who would be calling in the middle of the night on my _cellphone_!? A) I'm not _substituting_ on this Sunday paper route anymore, and even if I was, it's Monday morning now, not Sunday morning. B) All of the handful of _other_ people who might ever call me in the middle of the night are - partly _by_ _definition_ - not the people who have my cellphone number!"
But I answered it, and what did it turn out to be, but my event reminder telling me that it's 3am "Sunday" and therefore time "4" my paper route.
This was very weird, because for the whole year and a half since I'd discovered how to use this event-reminder feature of my new cellphone, I'd been _religiously_ following that just-before-3am-Sunday timeframe as the time to _always_ be getting ready to do my weekly paperboying. So, although I was tired enough that under normal circumstances I would have gone _right_ back to sleep, I didn't.
Even when I'm on a bike or canoe trip sleeping in the woods near a railroad and the sound of an approaching train wakes me up, my brain's checking and re-checking of the "Am I on the tracks?" consideration only keeps me awake for a minute, if that. (Or two minutes maybe, in the case of my _non_-stopping-for-the-night canoeing days in 1975, when I _was_ in the path of barges that I had to sit up and paddle out of the way of.)
But in this case, it took me an _hour_ to go back to sleep, because, having traveled back in time _before_, I was considering _every_ _angle_ of, "Am I _sure_ that 12/28 is in the _past_? I remember it, and the delivery that I completed on it, very distinctly; however, am I _sure_ that there isn't some _other_ time-warp possibility of how 12/28 could perhaps happen a second time - and for Sunday carriers to be expected to show up and do a repeat 12/28 delivery - subsequent in time to 12/29?"
In conclusion, I feel vindicated now for being one of the last non-users of cellphones; I detested them and didn't knuckle under and get one until I became a paper boy. (They _are_ admittedly useful for a specific purpose such as that.) I think wierd things are _generally_ starting to happen with my cellphone, because a couple of weeks ago, it seemed to _call_ two of the numbers that were in my directory on it, plus several randomly-generated numbers, all by itself!
Friday, December 26, 2008
Thanks for all the tips!
I'm still receiving tips in the mail every day! Tip for carriers everywhere: Include your address on your Christmas Card that you give to your customers.
And yes, the Times does pass along the regular tips that are given by customers who pay through the Times. Snippets indicate that not all of the customers were sure of that; but, they need not worry: I see those tips every week of the year on the sheet that the Times gives me, including which customers the tips are from.
12/21 delivery report: I finished the delivery very late, and I can't blame the Times, because the papers had arrived at the distribution center on time; how embarrassing.
The only other time that I'd finished even nearly as late as I did this past Sunday, not counting my early-2007 newbie days, had been on last year's last Sunday before Christmas.
The last Sunday before Christmas is the most time-consuming delivery of the year to begin with, due to all the time of sticking my Christmas cards into the papers and stopping at doors to untape all the containing-of-tips ones from customers. But this time, to top it off, I'd left home at 3:20 instead of my usual 3:00.
I'd been up all night Saturday night fixing up a bike with which to improve the efficiency of certain parts of the delivery. It being the first in-the-snow delivery of the season, I figured that that's the time when it's most likely to be advantageous to have the bike along: With the bike (at least on the route segments on which it's worth the time of unloading it from the pickup truck), I can go up the often-cleared driveways - as opposed to taking my usual shortcuts across the lawns, which the snow is an impediment on - to the customers' doorsteps. It's still an ongoing process to figure out which streets this will and won't save time on.
But the Times vindicated me: I called the Times at 8 am (already a half an hour past the proper finishing time) to let them know that I still had a long ways to go (that way, they'd know what to tell any customers who call saying that they don't have their paper), and what did I get but a recording, telling customers to "bear with us" because the deliveries are late due to the weather!
And I had thought that this business prided itself in not letting weather be an excuse.
But finishing late wasn't the most embarrassing thing that I did that morning. Here's what takes the cake: At one customer's door, I took the tip envelope and forgot to leave a paper! Sleep deprivation, I guess.
And yes, the Times does pass along the regular tips that are given by customers who pay through the Times. Snippets indicate that not all of the customers were sure of that; but, they need not worry: I see those tips every week of the year on the sheet that the Times gives me, including which customers the tips are from.
12/21 delivery report: I finished the delivery very late, and I can't blame the Times, because the papers had arrived at the distribution center on time; how embarrassing.
The only other time that I'd finished even nearly as late as I did this past Sunday, not counting my early-2007 newbie days, had been on last year's last Sunday before Christmas.
The last Sunday before Christmas is the most time-consuming delivery of the year to begin with, due to all the time of sticking my Christmas cards into the papers and stopping at doors to untape all the containing-of-tips ones from customers. But this time, to top it off, I'd left home at 3:20 instead of my usual 3:00.
I'd been up all night Saturday night fixing up a bike with which to improve the efficiency of certain parts of the delivery. It being the first in-the-snow delivery of the season, I figured that that's the time when it's most likely to be advantageous to have the bike along: With the bike (at least on the route segments on which it's worth the time of unloading it from the pickup truck), I can go up the often-cleared driveways - as opposed to taking my usual shortcuts across the lawns, which the snow is an impediment on - to the customers' doorsteps. It's still an ongoing process to figure out which streets this will and won't save time on.
But the Times vindicated me: I called the Times at 8 am (already a half an hour past the proper finishing time) to let them know that I still had a long ways to go (that way, they'd know what to tell any customers who call saying that they don't have their paper), and what did I get but a recording, telling customers to "bear with us" because the deliveries are late due to the weather!
And I had thought that this business prided itself in not letting weather be an excuse.
But finishing late wasn't the most embarrassing thing that I did that morning. Here's what takes the cake: At one customer's door, I took the tip envelope and forgot to leave a paper! Sleep deprivation, I guess.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Welcome Customers to the blog, and Merry Christmas to all!
I've got the route's 2008 Christmas Card all cooked up and ready to start sticking into the papers on the 12/21 delivery. This card kills two birds with one stone by 1) wishing y'all a Merry Christmas, and 2) unleashing the url of this blog so as include the route's customers in the potential audience of it and thereby expose myself to one more avenue for comments about my service, as my thank-you for how good-tipping of a route this is.
Friday, December 12, 2008
Our friend the paper-boy CPA
Everybody likes to bash professions other than their own, and I'm no exception when anybody mentions CPAs or the dirt that they play in. I used to like to respond to that type of conversation with, "Do you want your mouth washed out with soap?" My attitude for many years about the dirt that CPAs play in was: Either the common man can figure out for _himself_ how to fill out the forms for appeasing the IRS and its cousins, or, in the cases in which such bureaucrats have failed to make the forms sufficiently simple for the common man to figure out in not too many hours per year, the particular taxpayer who's a victim of this ought to go to Siberia and seek asylum. My fuming about this festered enough for me to figure out how this could probably be done by canoeing from Little Diamede Island to Big Diamede Island.
But then around 1990, the Soviet Union went soft, and the pipe dream therefore ceased to mean anything.
And now I think I'm finally going to delete "CPA scum" from my vocabulary. What triggered my newfound respect for CPAs? Well, over the summer, I learned what one of them moonlights as, after I saw him make a presentation at one of the meetings that we've been having here in the Marcellus Shale about considerations such as how, if a landowner is more money-hungry than you or me and accepts money from a gas company (_if_ that "up front" payment ever even comes - and that's _another_ reason the Frost Farm refuses to sign a company lease: I actually get more payee-friendly fine print as a _paper_ _boy_!), then that landowner can (get the soap ready for washing my mouth out with, folks) count that allegedly-up-front payment as "advance royalty" on his or her tax return and thereby deduct 15% or whatever the number is.
But the thing that I was about to learn that this CPA moonlights as, doesn't have anything to do with that presentation that he did, nor about anything else having to do with the gasmen activity. Rather, this CPA was walking up to me at the end of such meetings to shake my hand and tell me that he sees me in Clarks Summit every Sunday morning.
I guessed that he looked a little bit familiar, but I couldn't recall what _part_ of the route I'd seen him on. So, when I got home, I waded through my paper-route customer lists looking for his last name. It was nowhere to be found; so, next, I assumed that perhaps somebody in his household with a different last name was paying for his house's subscription, and/or perhaps he was one of the few early risers out taking walks or whatever while I'm delivering in their neighborhoods. That exhausts all of the possibilities, right?
Wrong! Where did I see this CPA the next Sunday morning (which was the first Sunday morning that I was _looking_ for his face), but in the distribution center, at 4 am, preparing for his delivery! He's a paper boy!
I think he's doing it to teach his kid to be a paper boy, based on the fact that he frequently brings his kid along to help. The route is even apparently in his kid's name, even though the kid is often apparently at home sleeping while the paper-boy CPA does his route for him. But still, what "typical" CPA would want his kid to be a paper boy?
So, more power to the paper-boy CPA!
If I ever need a CPA, I'm going to go to his office during the week and _pay_ for his advice. I _won't_ do what I saw more than one carrier do at the distribution center this past Sunday: They were walking up to the paper-boy CPA and pumping him for free tax advice, including when he appeared to be trying to concentrate on preparing his piles of newspapers for his delivery! He was graciously giving the free tax advice to them and, I suspect in the process, losing his count of his newspapers. Indeed, one non-tax-related snippet that could be overheard at the distribution center that same morning was that on at least one delivery, the paper-boy CPA hadn't gotten his updates of what customers to stop and start. Well I wonder why?
I hope that by now, by sticking up for _both_ of the professions of the paper-boy CPA and hereby welcoming him to the brotherhood of paper carriers, I've earned my right to appease, in some future post, an ulterior motive that I had in doing so: Stay tuned for a _bashing_ of the "CPA" part of the paper-boy CPA's identity, whenever I get around to writing a certain post here that I've had in my head for a couple of months (although maybe not until after I do some posting about unrelated aspects that are even more on my mind, of my paper-delivery adventures).
Hey, CPAs _are_ fair game, aren't they, judging by the fact that I once saw a big contingent of _them_ making fun of their _own_ profession in a deluxe song that they sung while marching along in a parade?
But then around 1990, the Soviet Union went soft, and the pipe dream therefore ceased to mean anything.
And now I think I'm finally going to delete "CPA scum" from my vocabulary. What triggered my newfound respect for CPAs? Well, over the summer, I learned what one of them moonlights as, after I saw him make a presentation at one of the meetings that we've been having here in the Marcellus Shale about considerations such as how, if a landowner is more money-hungry than you or me and accepts money from a gas company (_if_ that "up front" payment ever even comes - and that's _another_ reason the Frost Farm refuses to sign a company lease: I actually get more payee-friendly fine print as a _paper_ _boy_!), then that landowner can (get the soap ready for washing my mouth out with, folks) count that allegedly-up-front payment as "advance royalty" on his or her tax return and thereby deduct 15% or whatever the number is.
But the thing that I was about to learn that this CPA moonlights as, doesn't have anything to do with that presentation that he did, nor about anything else having to do with the gasmen activity. Rather, this CPA was walking up to me at the end of such meetings to shake my hand and tell me that he sees me in Clarks Summit every Sunday morning.
I guessed that he looked a little bit familiar, but I couldn't recall what _part_ of the route I'd seen him on. So, when I got home, I waded through my paper-route customer lists looking for his last name. It was nowhere to be found; so, next, I assumed that perhaps somebody in his household with a different last name was paying for his house's subscription, and/or perhaps he was one of the few early risers out taking walks or whatever while I'm delivering in their neighborhoods. That exhausts all of the possibilities, right?
Wrong! Where did I see this CPA the next Sunday morning (which was the first Sunday morning that I was _looking_ for his face), but in the distribution center, at 4 am, preparing for his delivery! He's a paper boy!
I think he's doing it to teach his kid to be a paper boy, based on the fact that he frequently brings his kid along to help. The route is even apparently in his kid's name, even though the kid is often apparently at home sleeping while the paper-boy CPA does his route for him. But still, what "typical" CPA would want his kid to be a paper boy?
So, more power to the paper-boy CPA!
If I ever need a CPA, I'm going to go to his office during the week and _pay_ for his advice. I _won't_ do what I saw more than one carrier do at the distribution center this past Sunday: They were walking up to the paper-boy CPA and pumping him for free tax advice, including when he appeared to be trying to concentrate on preparing his piles of newspapers for his delivery! He was graciously giving the free tax advice to them and, I suspect in the process, losing his count of his newspapers. Indeed, one non-tax-related snippet that could be overheard at the distribution center that same morning was that on at least one delivery, the paper-boy CPA hadn't gotten his updates of what customers to stop and start. Well I wonder why?
I hope that by now, by sticking up for _both_ of the professions of the paper-boy CPA and hereby welcoming him to the brotherhood of paper carriers, I've earned my right to appease, in some future post, an ulterior motive that I had in doing so: Stay tuned for a _bashing_ of the "CPA" part of the paper-boy CPA's identity, whenever I get around to writing a certain post here that I've had in my head for a couple of months (although maybe not until after I do some posting about unrelated aspects that are even more on my mind, of my paper-delivery adventures).
Hey, CPAs _are_ fair game, aren't they, judging by the fact that I once saw a big contingent of _them_ making fun of their _own_ profession in a deluxe song that they sung while marching along in a parade?
Monday, November 3, 2008
Gun-clingers for McCain!
Well my home 'pooter broke down shortly after I started this blog, helping to force me to adhere to my goal of not spouting too voluminously therein. After the first 2 weeks of that, I finally started going into libraries once or twice a week, such as the one that I'm in now. But that's not enough internet time for properly unleashing a deluxe thing or two that I was beginning to cook up (such as a diatribe - stay tuned for whenever I do unleash it - questioning whether the brotherhood of paper carriers should include one whom, I've learned, happens to be CPA as his day job). So here's the next best thing:
This blog hereby endorses McCain/Palin!
I'd been an Obama fan for a long time, and then a Bob Barr fan. It took me until yesterday, when I whimsically attended McCain's rally in Scranton, to decide who I'm voting for. The excitement at that rally was such that you couldn't attend it and _not_ vote for him, and part of my inspiration for attending was a snippet in yesterday's Sunday Times in which some leftist was quoted as saying that the reason McCain was visiting Scranton was that he was counting on Northeastern Pennsylvanians to be bigots.
Well how come not a single bigoted remark was said in earshot of me during the whole several hours of that rally?
Rather, it's like what I said a while back to that Chicagoan opponent of mine on the cycling lists who wants to come here to spike the Frost Farm's trees: We _are_ bitter, and cling to our guns, here in small-town Pennsylvania, _and_ we know when and when not to overcome our bitterness.
I decided while at the rally yesterday, to overcome my bitterness toward Sarah Palin for lying through her teeth about the Bridge to Nowhere.
This blog hereby endorses McCain/Palin!
I'd been an Obama fan for a long time, and then a Bob Barr fan. It took me until yesterday, when I whimsically attended McCain's rally in Scranton, to decide who I'm voting for. The excitement at that rally was such that you couldn't attend it and _not_ vote for him, and part of my inspiration for attending was a snippet in yesterday's Sunday Times in which some leftist was quoted as saying that the reason McCain was visiting Scranton was that he was counting on Northeastern Pennsylvanians to be bigots.
Well how come not a single bigoted remark was said in earshot of me during the whole several hours of that rally?
Rather, it's like what I said a while back to that Chicagoan opponent of mine on the cycling lists who wants to come here to spike the Frost Farm's trees: We _are_ bitter, and cling to our guns, here in small-town Pennsylvania, _and_ we know when and when not to overcome our bitterness.
I decided while at the rally yesterday, to overcome my bitterness toward Sarah Palin for lying through her teeth about the Bridge to Nowhere.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
