The Saturday 10/9 issue of the Scranton Times-Tribune has a full-page, International Carrier Day salute to all of us Times-Tribune/Sunday Times carriers, listing all of our names (apparently 365 of us?) below the compliment, "Through rain, snow, sleet and cold, your carrier endures it all to deliver the news of the world to your doorstep."
Well how about bill-ignorers? Although I thank the Times for the compliment about the "rain, snow, sleet and cold", I don't mind those things one bit! It is the bill-ignorers, rather, that I must "endure".
Well, that and the editor's slandering of two of my "frac" spellings to "frack", in my Letter to the Editor in August. The correct spelling, which the Susquehanna County Transcript got my minor point about but the Times didn't, is "frac".
Monday, October 11, 2010
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
Saturday 6/12/10 Binghamton-paper delivery report
Well I'm finally getting around to writing this particular delivery report that I promised to the Northeastern Pennsylvania Bicycle Messengering blog. As I boasted earlier, I substituted on this Binghamton-paper route over New Year's and, in my last post to the blog, I boasted that I was ready to do it again on June 12.
I'm happy to report success in not only bringing the bike along (admittedly on top of my loaded-with-5-cent-bottles-to-supplement-the-trip's-revenue pickup truck like I've been doing for a lot of my Binghamton visits lately) but using it to deliver the Saturday Press & Sun papers to all 95-or-whatever houses in only two bikeloads.
(Compare that to my regular 180-house Sunday route in Clarks Summit that this blog tries to be devoted to, where everything is in considerably less compact of a geographical area and, more importantly, the Sunday papers are fat: It's still taking me a long time to weed the excess motoring out of that one. There, I still haven't gotten much beyond filling up as many carrier bags as possible with which to do 8-to-16-house segments by foot, and that's why this blog has been silent for a while.)
Anyhow, these Saturday 6/12 Binghamton papers were delivered to me at 5:10 and I delivered to the last house at 7:18; so, although that's 18 minutes late, it's a scores-of-percent speed improvement over when I did it over New Year's, back when I was an even-more-complete newbie to the route. I would have finished only 14 minutes late instead of 18 if NYDOT hadn't violated my Triadal http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm rights by having its detector loop fail to detect me when I was trying to get back across 12A from the commuter parking lot while returning to resume the delivery after obeying a call of nature in the woods behind the commuter parking lot.
This bike that I used was what I described earlier in this blog as my "devoted-to-paperboying bike" - i.e. the one with, most importantly, 1) a kickstand and 2) the homemade front panniers consisting of halves of plastic filing boxes. But the update on that is that that bike has now been promoted to also being my primary bike: I'm happy to report success in, early this month, finally accumulating a frame-breaking number of miles on my old Fuji (i.e. the Time-Traveling Iron Steed of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century) that had been my primary bike for 10 years.
I'm happy to report success in not only bringing the bike along (admittedly on top of my loaded-with-5-cent-bottles-to-supplement-the-trip's-revenue pickup truck like I've been doing for a lot of my Binghamton visits lately) but using it to deliver the Saturday Press & Sun papers to all 95-or-whatever houses in only two bikeloads.
(Compare that to my regular 180-house Sunday route in Clarks Summit that this blog tries to be devoted to, where everything is in considerably less compact of a geographical area and, more importantly, the Sunday papers are fat: It's still taking me a long time to weed the excess motoring out of that one. There, I still haven't gotten much beyond filling up as many carrier bags as possible with which to do 8-to-16-house segments by foot, and that's why this blog has been silent for a while.)
Anyhow, these Saturday 6/12 Binghamton papers were delivered to me at 5:10 and I delivered to the last house at 7:18; so, although that's 18 minutes late, it's a scores-of-percent speed improvement over when I did it over New Year's, back when I was an even-more-complete newbie to the route. I would have finished only 14 minutes late instead of 18 if NYDOT hadn't violated my Triadal http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm rights by having its detector loop fail to detect me when I was trying to get back across 12A from the commuter parking lot while returning to resume the delivery after obeying a call of nature in the woods behind the commuter parking lot.
This bike that I used was what I described earlier in this blog as my "devoted-to-paperboying bike" - i.e. the one with, most importantly, 1) a kickstand and 2) the homemade front panniers consisting of halves of plastic filing boxes. But the update on that is that that bike has now been promoted to also being my primary bike: I'm happy to report success in, early this month, finally accumulating a frame-breaking number of miles on my old Fuji (i.e. the Time-Traveling Iron Steed of The Last Bike Ride Out of the 20th Century) that had been my primary bike for 10 years.
New comment policy
Regrettably, just now, I finally got around to figuring out how to change the "comments" setting to "moderated". I had been meaning to do so for a while, due to the increasing number of spammers. I apologize in advance to all other commenters, who will now have to wait until I come online and approve their comment before it appears.
[Edit: I changed the time stamp on this post, to lie by a few hours so as to have it appear below, rather than above, my other post of today.]
[Edit: I changed the time stamp on this post, to lie by a few hours so as to have it appear below, rather than above, my other post of today.]
Friday, June 11, 2010
Ready for another Binghamton-paper delivery!
Back at New Year's I boasted about substituting on a Binghamton-area paper route. I'm happy to report that I'm going to do that again tomorrow morning, i.e. Saturday. Stay tuned for a report on it when I get around to writing it sometime afterwards.
I've got the bike ready to use this time (unlike the other time), and that ought to help speed the delivery up. But I'll be cheating and driving the pickup truck to the start again, because I still have loads and loads of the N.Y. 5 cent bottles that the Forest City Recycling Center gives me and that I cash in on every time I go to Binghamton, making the motoring trip more than pay for itself.
I've got the bike ready to use this time (unlike the other time), and that ought to help speed the delivery up. But I'll be cheating and driving the pickup truck to the start again, because I still have loads and loads of the N.Y. 5 cent bottles that the Forest City Recycling Center gives me and that I cash in on every time I go to Binghamton, making the motoring trip more than pay for itself.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Eat Krispy Kreme Doughnuts
...to celebrate when you've passed a test.
I normally only go to Dunkin Donuts, but Krispy Kreme is the favorite stop of the ham who as I off-topically boasted in this blog a while back, informed me that it was even possible for a bumpkin such as myself to join the elite ranks of Extra, the top of ham radio. So on Wednesday night on my way home from passing the Extra, I stopped at Krispy Kreme.
I normally only go to Dunkin Donuts, but Krispy Kreme is the favorite stop of the ham who as I off-topically boasted in this blog a while back, informed me that it was even possible for a bumpkin such as myself to join the elite ranks of Extra, the top of ham radio. So on Wednesday night on my way home from passing the Extra, I stopped at Krispy Kreme.
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Times' "free subscription" gimmick costs carrier $30. worth of time to collect $9.
Unlike any of my other businesses, being a paper boy involves the monkeying around of keeping track of a big number of customers for a relatively chump-change amount of money per customer: Route 62226 has 180 customers (or perhaps down to more like 176 lately due to the economy), so naturally - and here's the detestable part - out of that many people there will always be at least a couple per year that I have to fart around knocking on the door of to get my money.
So before I started this blog, I pipe dreamed that a major feature of it was going to be to plaster the names of slow-paying customers all over the place as a strategy to shame them into paying.
But as it turns out, I seem to always get my money by other methodologies short of that. I keep on forgetting to report to y'all the many stories about the various ways that I've done so, but here's the latest one:
Today, I finally succeeded in getting another ignoring-of-my-bills customer to talk to me. (Part of the trick is to vary what time of day, etc., you knock on their door.) This one had only been a subscriber for a brief time, about a year ago, and then after they'd cancelled I'd kept on leaving a bill there for $9. (the same $9., for a certain 6 Sundays almost a year ago), every month or so for almost a year (with all of my contact info on it too BTW, but that's a whole 'nuther diatribe).
I guess they must have thought that if they keep on ignoring it I'd eventually give up or something especially since it's "only" $9. Well it doesn't work that way with Tom Frost.
When I knocked on their door a few weeks ago, it was entertaining in that I happened to very briefly see a guy in there who didn't see that I'd seen him, squirm around and move to a couch that was more out of sight of the door. (My alcoholic neighbor, upon hearing that story, said that I should have shouted "I see you"; but, I didn't.)
Today, however, there were more people about, and a lady answered the door.
Just as I suspected would likely happen, she almost paid, but then began nitpicking that instead, she's going to call the Times and argue that the year-ago subscription was supposed to be cancelled on an earlier date than it was.
Well fine; I can easily collect the $9. from the Times by monkeying around a little bit more (what the hell: I've already spent probably $30. worth of time just with all of the repetitious preparing of that same bill together with wasting my brain energy worrying about how to time my cruises through Clarks Summit to best accommodate knocking on their door, so what's a little bit more time?) and filling out a form that the Times has for just this sort of purpose.
In most cases, the challenge is to try to educate the non-paying customer about the fact that when I get the Times to pay me that way, it will still cost the customer the same amount of money anyhow because when the customer switches to paying through the Times, the Times simply shortens the customer's future paid-for period in order to reimburse itself what it paid me for the past period that I filled out the form for.
But in this case, I was 100% easy to get along with about making the Times pay, and here's why: All of the evidence indicates that this only-for-a-brief-time-last-year subscriber was a victim of one of the Times' "free" deals for new subscribers. They apparently give a new subscriber so many weeks for free, and then when that runs out, they have to pay if they want to continue. Well if I was selling something by that kind of methodology, I'd make sure that cancelling is easy to do if the customer wishes to hold the offerer's feet to the fire about the subscription being "free".
I detest those kind of gimmicks. And therefore (despite qualms such as the fact that the customer could have been more skilled at getting it cancelled at the end of the "free" period; I suspect that all that she would have had to do would have been to notice the "Your account has gone carrier collect" notice that I included with her paper at that time), I'm going to take the customer's word for it that the Times failed for 6 weeks to tell me to stop delivering to her.
And that's just one example of how, in the case of a fortunately-small percentage of customers, a paper boy has to fart around spending $30. worth of time to collect $9. And I'm going to keep on doing it.
So before I started this blog, I pipe dreamed that a major feature of it was going to be to plaster the names of slow-paying customers all over the place as a strategy to shame them into paying.
But as it turns out, I seem to always get my money by other methodologies short of that. I keep on forgetting to report to y'all the many stories about the various ways that I've done so, but here's the latest one:
Today, I finally succeeded in getting another ignoring-of-my-bills customer to talk to me. (Part of the trick is to vary what time of day, etc., you knock on their door.) This one had only been a subscriber for a brief time, about a year ago, and then after they'd cancelled I'd kept on leaving a bill there for $9. (the same $9., for a certain 6 Sundays almost a year ago), every month or so for almost a year (with all of my contact info on it too BTW, but that's a whole 'nuther diatribe).
I guess they must have thought that if they keep on ignoring it I'd eventually give up or something especially since it's "only" $9. Well it doesn't work that way with Tom Frost.
When I knocked on their door a few weeks ago, it was entertaining in that I happened to very briefly see a guy in there who didn't see that I'd seen him, squirm around and move to a couch that was more out of sight of the door. (My alcoholic neighbor, upon hearing that story, said that I should have shouted "I see you"; but, I didn't.)
Today, however, there were more people about, and a lady answered the door.
Just as I suspected would likely happen, she almost paid, but then began nitpicking that instead, she's going to call the Times and argue that the year-ago subscription was supposed to be cancelled on an earlier date than it was.
Well fine; I can easily collect the $9. from the Times by monkeying around a little bit more (what the hell: I've already spent probably $30. worth of time just with all of the repetitious preparing of that same bill together with wasting my brain energy worrying about how to time my cruises through Clarks Summit to best accommodate knocking on their door, so what's a little bit more time?) and filling out a form that the Times has for just this sort of purpose.
In most cases, the challenge is to try to educate the non-paying customer about the fact that when I get the Times to pay me that way, it will still cost the customer the same amount of money anyhow because when the customer switches to paying through the Times, the Times simply shortens the customer's future paid-for period in order to reimburse itself what it paid me for the past period that I filled out the form for.
But in this case, I was 100% easy to get along with about making the Times pay, and here's why: All of the evidence indicates that this only-for-a-brief-time-last-year subscriber was a victim of one of the Times' "free" deals for new subscribers. They apparently give a new subscriber so many weeks for free, and then when that runs out, they have to pay if they want to continue. Well if I was selling something by that kind of methodology, I'd make sure that cancelling is easy to do if the customer wishes to hold the offerer's feet to the fire about the subscription being "free".
I detest those kind of gimmicks. And therefore (despite qualms such as the fact that the customer could have been more skilled at getting it cancelled at the end of the "free" period; I suspect that all that she would have had to do would have been to notice the "Your account has gone carrier collect" notice that I included with her paper at that time), I'm going to take the customer's word for it that the Times failed for 6 weeks to tell me to stop delivering to her.
And that's just one example of how, in the case of a fortunately-small percentage of customers, a paper boy has to fart around spending $30. worth of time to collect $9. And I'm going to keep on doing it.
Sunday, April 18, 2010
Leave the snooze-shortening to us
Greyhound likes to boast, "Leave the driving to us", but how many of their drivers would last very long as a paper boy?
In my sporadic riding of Greyhound (of which I've done none lately) I've been impressed with how they can maneuver, as if they're driving an economy car, in and out of cities so congested I wouldn't want to drive anything bigger than a bicycle into them. But we as paper boys have to be pretty slick too at maneuvering our vehicles around.
For example, despite all of the still-slowly-increasing number (as I've sporadically boasted in this blog) of sections of the route where I park the Frost Farm's pickup truck in relatively few places (from which to do up to 16 or so houses at a time by foot or occasionally by bicycle, for those of my valued readers who may have just hopped aboard), there are still a few places where it saves time to simply maneuver the pickup truck in and out of the customers' driveways or similarly-tight spots one by one. Although paperboys'/girls' vehicles aren't as big as Greyhound's, we do need to be coordinated in other ways that Greyhound drivers don't, such as delaying putting on the brakes until late enough to let the vehicle's forward speed add speed to a forward-thrown paper while still early enough to avoid bashing into the customer's garage door.
Another one of the skills that a paper boy needs (at least on the occasions when we've failed to get enough sleep the night before - like me this morning when I'd waited until the last minute, Saturday night, to prepare the carrier-collect envelopes again) is picking a spot at which to stop and take a snooze in the pickup truck later on Sunday morning (after finishing the route and going to McDonald's but before driving all the way home). The flea market, Weis and Lackawanna State Park are among my favorite places to take this apre-paperboying snooze; it depends largely on which destination I wish to frequent that morning anyhow.
This morning, the place where I did it was a "destination" only in the sense of the word "destination" that I use in "The First Pennsylvania Interstate Highway Cycling Permit" (a homemade-in-1989 document that - as I think I can be found in the archives somewhere of the Chainguard yahoo group boasting about - I used in conjunction with my bicycle to access it, despite the "Motor Vehicles Only" sign on the on-ramp to it, when I was an Attendant there in 1989): The Tompkinsville I-81 rest area.
This morning, as I snoozed at that rest area at around 10am or so (I guess a study of a Greyhound northbound-to-"Syracuse" schedule would always be one way of jogging my memory about the exact time, if it had been a "real" hit and run), what did I get awakened by but a sideways bump. For the first few seconds, I thought it might be a bunch of punks trying to roll the Frost Farm's pickup truck over onto its side (one reason I'd locked myself inside it before going to sleep). But no; what did I see out my right-rear quadrant but a big wall of blue. And then I saw it backing up, far enough to bring first the dog emblem and then the "Syracuse", into view, which reminded me that blue is Greyhound's new color.
Not an iota of damage! That was surprising, since my rear bumper took it in the direction in which it's weakest, namely diagonally (I was diagonally-parked and the "professional" was trying to parallel-park). I walked out and looked at it after the "professional" did, because it took me a minute to wake the rest of the way up. During that minute, my tinted rear glass was fun in that I could see him and the worried look on his face without him seeing me, although he also had plenty of opportunities to see me during the several minutes before I left. It's interesting to note that he seemed to pretend not to notice that I was anywhere around, because that way he avoided having to apologize for waking me up.
In my sporadic riding of Greyhound (of which I've done none lately) I've been impressed with how they can maneuver, as if they're driving an economy car, in and out of cities so congested I wouldn't want to drive anything bigger than a bicycle into them. But we as paper boys have to be pretty slick too at maneuvering our vehicles around.
For example, despite all of the still-slowly-increasing number (as I've sporadically boasted in this blog) of sections of the route where I park the Frost Farm's pickup truck in relatively few places (from which to do up to 16 or so houses at a time by foot or occasionally by bicycle, for those of my valued readers who may have just hopped aboard), there are still a few places where it saves time to simply maneuver the pickup truck in and out of the customers' driveways or similarly-tight spots one by one. Although paperboys'/girls' vehicles aren't as big as Greyhound's, we do need to be coordinated in other ways that Greyhound drivers don't, such as delaying putting on the brakes until late enough to let the vehicle's forward speed add speed to a forward-thrown paper while still early enough to avoid bashing into the customer's garage door.
Another one of the skills that a paper boy needs (at least on the occasions when we've failed to get enough sleep the night before - like me this morning when I'd waited until the last minute, Saturday night, to prepare the carrier-collect envelopes again) is picking a spot at which to stop and take a snooze in the pickup truck later on Sunday morning (after finishing the route and going to McDonald's but before driving all the way home). The flea market, Weis and Lackawanna State Park are among my favorite places to take this apre-paperboying snooze; it depends largely on which destination I wish to frequent that morning anyhow.
This morning, the place where I did it was a "destination" only in the sense of the word "destination" that I use in "The First Pennsylvania Interstate Highway Cycling Permit" (a homemade-in-1989 document that - as I think I can be found in the archives somewhere of the Chainguard yahoo group boasting about - I used in conjunction with my bicycle to access it, despite the "Motor Vehicles Only" sign on the on-ramp to it, when I was an Attendant there in 1989): The Tompkinsville I-81 rest area.
This morning, as I snoozed at that rest area at around 10am or so (I guess a study of a Greyhound northbound-to-"Syracuse" schedule would always be one way of jogging my memory about the exact time, if it had been a "real" hit and run), what did I get awakened by but a sideways bump. For the first few seconds, I thought it might be a bunch of punks trying to roll the Frost Farm's pickup truck over onto its side (one reason I'd locked myself inside it before going to sleep). But no; what did I see out my right-rear quadrant but a big wall of blue. And then I saw it backing up, far enough to bring first the dog emblem and then the "Syracuse", into view, which reminded me that blue is Greyhound's new color.
Not an iota of damage! That was surprising, since my rear bumper took it in the direction in which it's weakest, namely diagonally (I was diagonally-parked and the "professional" was trying to parallel-park). I walked out and looked at it after the "professional" did, because it took me a minute to wake the rest of the way up. During that minute, my tinted rear glass was fun in that I could see him and the worried look on his face without him seeing me, although he also had plenty of opportunities to see me during the several minutes before I left. It's interesting to note that he seemed to pretend not to notice that I was anywhere around, because that way he avoided having to apologize for waking me up.
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