Working Principles Column
by Chris Howard, March 13, 1998
Think you know the business world inside and out? Imagine how a bike
courier sees it
"We're looking down," Tom Ellis mutters into his two-way radio
before swooping across Toronto's Eglinton Avenue, stranding me briefly
in the oncoming traffic.
My fault: I'm still learning the hell-bent nonchalance that propels
the bike courier across lanes, over curbs, around pedestrians. But Ellis
is apologetic as I catch him and we turn south onto Mount Pleasant Road:
"Sorry I almost got you killed there." We push off on the long,
fast descent from the locale of Ellis's dispatch office into the lucrative
downtown core.
Until now, Ellis's world and mine have intersected only in the ways you'd
expect. In the elevator, I'm the one in the business suit, he' s the one
in the lycra and reflective tape.
But today I've decided to step out of my world and into his. Maybe because
those worlds seem so different, but are so entwined. Or maybe because of
the increasing demonization of the courier: the other night, I watched
a TV commercial in which a couple appear to have succeeded in escaping
the city in their 4x4, only to glance up and spot - eek! - a leering, helmeted
fiend through the window. Has it come to this - captains of industry cowed
by kids on bikes?
Right now I don't need to be reminded how this is literally an outsider
culture. It's -11 deg C at Bloor and Jarvis - where we share a joke with
some squeegee kids - and the wind gusting around the tall buildings is
brutal.
On our indoor treks to mailrooms and reception desks, thawing our feet
and hands, I learn that Ellis, who is 27, has been a courier for only a
few months, but a serious cyclist for 15 years. Before this job, he was
a funeral director for six years. He left because the industry could spare
no room for the goatee and longish hair he now sports.
But he has no regrets for those years: "I learned more about the human
condition...," he says, shaking his head as the elevator doors open
with a ping. Then it's out the exit marked "Please use revolving door"
- we spend our day, it seems, taking routes expressly forbidden by signage
of all sorts.
The pace of pick-ups and drops has accelerated: law firm, accountant, law
firm, non-profit agency, investment company. The economics of the business,
as much as the needs of the clients, demand hustling. In the highly niched
Toronto market, according to Derek Chadbourne, who produces an outrageously
energetic cycling publication called hideouswhitenoise and has been a courier
for 11 years, the courier' s cut on a delivery - usually 60% - works out
to between 90[cents] and as much as $18. The average is probably around
$3 or $4.
Every courier I talked to prefers the commission set-up. "I like that
what I make depends on how hard I work," I'm told by Wal Dickie, a
lanky Australian who is usually on his bike but today is filling in as
the dispatcher on the other end of Ellis's radio.
Ambition is directed first at "making a bill," or $100 a day,
and then maybe at greener fields - Ellis has set his sights on London,
England, for example, where the hundred-a-day benchmark, in sterling, is
the equivalent of about $250.
Our last stop is "the dungeon" - an office under BCE Place to
which all couriers are directed - from which we escape with a (forbidden)
bravado blast up the steep spiral parking ramp.
"Good work," Ellis says when I reach the sidewalk. "There
are days when I can't make it."
We're off to a courier hangout, a small cafe a few blocks north where the
air is thick with cigarette smoke and the day's war stories. And where
couriers - unfailingly polite - explain why they love the life: the freedom,
the exercise, the camaraderie.
And then our worlds pull apart again. The next time I'm in an elevator
I'll be in my suit. But, maybe if there's a courier beside me, we' ll talk
about maniacal bus drivers, how to dress for winter riding, or the sweet
speed of a downhill right onto Richmond Street: all those little things
that make up the kinship of the road.
The pseudonymous Chris Howard toils in the middle ranks of a large Canadian
organization.
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