Thursday, April 15, 2010
Other paper-carrier forums
Here's one that I just joined: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/newspapercarriers
Sunday, March 14, 2010
Article about paper boys who give to charity
I was just googling around as I occasionally do for anecdotes about the ins and outs of being a paper boy, and what did I find but this current article about a pair of younger-than-most-of-the-ones-around-here paper boys:
http://communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/99999999/NEWS/906150326/Newspaper-carriers-deliver-more-than-the-news
The major reminding-of-me thing about them (besides the fact that one of them does his route on rollerblades, which is another thing that I occasionally pipe dream of, but that's a whole 'nuther story), is that for one month of each year they donate 100% of their earnings during that month to charity.
Hmmm; that's like about 8% of their total earnings for the year. It might even be even more than the I'm-still-trying-to-figure-out-what-the-percentage-is of 2009 tips that my route (in a whimsical, joint action between me and my Route Associate) gave to the St. Judes Children's Hospital.
So: I'm happy to learn that it's not completely unheard of for paper routes to be able to afford to give money to charity. I know it's rare, but, one of the reasons that I think I'm going to keep on doing it while I'm at it is that it might make good propaganda fodder for producing a chain reaction of more tips! Explosion In 2010!
http://communitypress.cincinnati.com/article/99999999/NEWS/906150326/Newspaper-carriers-deliver-more-than-the-news
The major reminding-of-me thing about them (besides the fact that one of them does his route on rollerblades, which is another thing that I occasionally pipe dream of, but that's a whole 'nuther story), is that for one month of each year they donate 100% of their earnings during that month to charity.
Hmmm; that's like about 8% of their total earnings for the year. It might even be even more than the I'm-still-trying-to-figure-out-what-the-percentage-is of 2009 tips that my route (in a whimsical, joint action between me and my Route Associate) gave to the St. Judes Children's Hospital.
So: I'm happy to learn that it's not completely unheard of for paper routes to be able to afford to give money to charity. I know it's rare, but, one of the reasons that I think I'm going to keep on doing it while I'm at it is that it might make good propaganda fodder for producing a chain reaction of more tips! Explosion In 2010!
Sunday, March 7, 2010
Response to "Time to Lose Time" leaflet
This weekend the Times unleashed, to its carriers, a leaflet entitled "Time to Lose Time". Well thanks for the info, several days before we were no doubt going to figure it out ourselves in a timely manner as we've successfully done every year, about how next Sunday, March 14, will be the date to set our clocks forward in preparation for.
Kind of ironic for the Times to be reminding its carriers instead of the other way around. It was us carriers who were all standing around at the distribution center waiting for the Times to wake up bring the bundles of papers, on all three (2007, 2008 and, to a marginally-lesser extent as I vaguely recall, 2009) "spring forward" Sundays that I've been a carrier.
Kind of ironic for the Times to be reminding its carriers instead of the other way around. It was us carriers who were all standing around at the distribution center waiting for the Times to wake up bring the bundles of papers, on all three (2007, 2008 and, to a marginally-lesser extent as I vaguely recall, 2009) "spring forward" Sundays that I've been a carrier.
Friday, January 1, 2010
The "Explosion in 2010" that I did conduct
As it turned out in non-fiction, my "Explosion in 2010" was that during the 7-day period ending today, 1/1/10, my total of newspapers delivered during any 7-day period - which previously, since early 2007, had been only 180 or thereabouts (which is what I do on Sundays in Clarks Summit) - "exploded" to 372!
Early yesterday morning I delivered the New Year's Eve edition, and then early this morning I delivered the New Year's Day edition, of the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin, to 96 of its subscribers in Chenango Bridge, N.Y.!
That's right: A Scranton Sunday Times carrier, proudly displaying the Scranton-newspaper logo on his carrier bag while walking/running around Binghamton-area neighborhoods delivering Binghamton weekday newspapers!
(To help anybody who's just surfed in to grasp the geographical silliness of this: Binghamton and Chenango Bridge are 40 miles north of where I live, and Clarks Summit on the other hand, where I deliver the Scranton Sunday Times, is only 17 miles south of where I live.)
180 Sunday papers on 12/27/09, + 96 admittedly-much-smaller weekday papers on 12/31/09, + 96 more on 1/1/10, makes 372 (or thereabouts) during the 7-day (or actually only 6-day) period ending 1/1/10. Explosion in 2010!
The whole idea for such a full-of-unknowns (that's what I enjoyed about it the most: it was like an encore of my early-2007 kick-off of the Clarks Summit route in that I was unfamiliar with the houses, not to mention the format that a different newspaper does its update sheets in, and took until way late to finish on both days) delivery adventure as this had come very suddenly, late on Wednesday 12/30:
Until then, I'd been lamenting about how I hadn't gotten around to preparing to conduct The Last Bike Ride Out of the Oughts and that time had also gotten more or less too short to prepare to properly conduct any (e.g. even one based on some cooked-up-at-the-last-minute solar-time zone boundary) Bike Ride Out of the Oughts. So, my mood had gradually become simply: Any "Explosion in 2010" -type adventure to kick the new decade off with, will do.
And that was when a fellow member of the Southern Tier Bicycle Club (whom, like all STBC members, I admittedly only very rarely see) saved the day: Late on Wednesday I happened to take one of my rare peeks at STBC's yahoo group, and what did I see but an announcement there that a substitute was needed on a club member's paper route on Thursday 12/31 and Friday 1/1.
I was already very behind on my sleep to begin with; so, lamentably, I motored up there, both days. The thing that most particularly makes me feel like I was "cheating" in that connection is that the carrier that I was substituting for usually bikes the route. The route's layout is such that even a newbie such as myself was able to park my motor vehicle in only about 3 places while, otherwise entirely (at least on the second day when I'd had more time to plan), delivering to 95 of the 96 customers by foot.
It was an intriguingly efficient route in that respect. Apparently in the Binghamton area (or maybe - but then what do I know, having never been a paper boy anywhere else except Clarks Summit, Pa. - many areas regardless of what newspaper's turf you're in that are more urban/"cyclist/pedestrian friendly" than Clarks Summit is), the bundles of papers arrive on the carrier's home porch at 4:30 am. This enables the carrier to establish a route that his/her residence is geographically centered in, thereby making the route very walkable/cyclable, as opposed to requiring all of the carriers to cruise to a distribution center to obtain their bundles of papers.
I hope to substitute on that route again sometime. I guess not too often either; I mainly just needed an adventure for New Year's. When I cycle to Binghamton the distance is no problem at all because time spent cycling is always time well spent regardless of the destination - it's the journey! But when I'm motoring to Binghamton, I need to have a load of my 5 cent bottles from the Forest City Recycling Center to cash in on in Binghamton (like I did yesterday and today - albeit smaller-than-usual loads) to help justify the motoring miles.
Happy New Year!
Early yesterday morning I delivered the New Year's Eve edition, and then early this morning I delivered the New Year's Day edition, of the Binghamton Press & Sun Bulletin, to 96 of its subscribers in Chenango Bridge, N.Y.!
That's right: A Scranton Sunday Times carrier, proudly displaying the Scranton-newspaper logo on his carrier bag while walking/running around Binghamton-area neighborhoods delivering Binghamton weekday newspapers!
(To help anybody who's just surfed in to grasp the geographical silliness of this: Binghamton and Chenango Bridge are 40 miles north of where I live, and Clarks Summit on the other hand, where I deliver the Scranton Sunday Times, is only 17 miles south of where I live.)
180 Sunday papers on 12/27/09, + 96 admittedly-much-smaller weekday papers on 12/31/09, + 96 more on 1/1/10, makes 372 (or thereabouts) during the 7-day (or actually only 6-day) period ending 1/1/10. Explosion in 2010!
The whole idea for such a full-of-unknowns (that's what I enjoyed about it the most: it was like an encore of my early-2007 kick-off of the Clarks Summit route in that I was unfamiliar with the houses, not to mention the format that a different newspaper does its update sheets in, and took until way late to finish on both days) delivery adventure as this had come very suddenly, late on Wednesday 12/30:
Until then, I'd been lamenting about how I hadn't gotten around to preparing to conduct The Last Bike Ride Out of the Oughts and that time had also gotten more or less too short to prepare to properly conduct any (e.g. even one based on some cooked-up-at-the-last-minute solar-time zone boundary) Bike Ride Out of the Oughts. So, my mood had gradually become simply: Any "Explosion in 2010" -type adventure to kick the new decade off with, will do.
And that was when a fellow member of the Southern Tier Bicycle Club (whom, like all STBC members, I admittedly only very rarely see) saved the day: Late on Wednesday I happened to take one of my rare peeks at STBC's yahoo group, and what did I see but an announcement there that a substitute was needed on a club member's paper route on Thursday 12/31 and Friday 1/1.
I was already very behind on my sleep to begin with; so, lamentably, I motored up there, both days. The thing that most particularly makes me feel like I was "cheating" in that connection is that the carrier that I was substituting for usually bikes the route. The route's layout is such that even a newbie such as myself was able to park my motor vehicle in only about 3 places while, otherwise entirely (at least on the second day when I'd had more time to plan), delivering to 95 of the 96 customers by foot.
It was an intriguingly efficient route in that respect. Apparently in the Binghamton area (or maybe - but then what do I know, having never been a paper boy anywhere else except Clarks Summit, Pa. - many areas regardless of what newspaper's turf you're in that are more urban/"cyclist/pedestrian friendly" than Clarks Summit is), the bundles of papers arrive on the carrier's home porch at 4:30 am. This enables the carrier to establish a route that his/her residence is geographically centered in, thereby making the route very walkable/cyclable, as opposed to requiring all of the carriers to cruise to a distribution center to obtain their bundles of papers.
I hope to substitute on that route again sometime. I guess not too often either; I mainly just needed an adventure for New Year's. When I cycle to Binghamton the distance is no problem at all because time spent cycling is always time well spent regardless of the destination - it's the journey! But when I'm motoring to Binghamton, I need to have a load of my 5 cent bottles from the Forest City Recycling Center to cash in on in Binghamton (like I did yesterday and today - albeit smaller-than-usual loads) to help justify the motoring miles.
Happy New Year!
Monday, December 28, 2009
War of the Worlds and my Last Sunday of the Oughts
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.
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, 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.
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