Tuesday, 31 Oct 2006

the public radio station KCRW just played a really interesting seque - I thought it was an extremely different version of Strange Fruit by Billie Holiday, but it turns out that towards the end of the song they played a piece by Chopin in the background. It worked amazingly well together.

12:52p	Billie Holiday	Strange Fruit	Commodore Master Takes Grp
12:55p	Chopin	Sonata No.2 (Funeral March)	Mad About Chopin Deutsche Grammophone

Speaking of not quite seques, I heard a song on the radio this morning that I THOUGHT was a really mellow acoustic version of an 80’s uptempo new-wave-pop-punk song with a harmonica playing the signature riff, but it turned out to be a Neil Young song “razor love”? The only problem is I can’t remember the name/band/or lyrics of the other song to compare them. :( the chorus has a repetitive vocal/keyboard melody like ‘nah nah nah nah…nah nah nah nah naaah nah’ and lyrics like ‘i’d like to say __ what i can do-ooh, just what i — want to do…’ it’s probably in the Depeche Mode mid 80’s timeframe, or maybe Joy Division if they were happier. Anyone know it? ;)

Thursday, 26 Oct 2006

so innocuous sounding a start to a (rare) memo from the powers that be at the newspaper I am an ‘independant contractor’ for. pasted on the white board with a handwritten marker note ‘important! please read!’. the white board that usually is reserved for important notes for the day like ‘wednesday Oct 3. Raining - DOUBLE BAG!’ or ‘Ad Bags for all East Hadly routes zip codes 02012-02013-02014″.

of course the letter starts off with a lie, none of the carriers reading the note have the foggiest idea what they are talking about unless they are friendly with an actual employee of the paper who let something slip before the info was officially approved for general knowledge.

So the jist of the memo is that as of 2 weeks from now there will be no more ‘carrier collect’ customers, everyone is being transitioned to the ‘convenient’ prepaid model where subscribers pay the paper directly, in advance - thus ‘eliminating the need to collect payment from subscribers”. Fair enough, collecting cash and keeping track of who has paid what and arguing with people who say they paid when they didn’t takes at least a couple of hours a week, and can be aggravating when people don’t pay for 3 months or say they have paid when they haven’t, but with the cash payments from customers comes something that I don’t get with prepaid customers (with 1 exception) - TIPS.

Out of a couple of hundred people who pay the paper company directly for delivery only one regularly leaves a generous tip, a couple of others occassionally leave a dollar tip once every few weeks. So about 1% of prepaid customers tip, but rare is the person counting out the $2.40 in change for their weekly paper carrier or the $2.05 for their Sunday paper who doesn’t throw in an extra quarter or two or even a dollar bill or two into the envelope. Sounds like small change doesn’t it? It is, but when you are getting less than 25 cents a day to deliver a newspaper to someone a $1 tip is HUGE. A $2 tip means that the tip is larger than the amount I am paid by the paper to actually deliver the paper. Tips are a HUGE incentive for paper carriers, and help ease the annoyance of having to get out of the car 20+ times in 2 hours between 4-6AM to deliver newspapers to people who want their newspaper delivered to the top step of their porch on a freezing cold and rainy day, and those $1 bills and quarters can add up - with 30-40 carrier collect customers combined in the 3 daily and Sunday routes I have the tips usually add up to be somewhere between $20-$40. Still doesn’t sound like much probably, but for me it’s a full tank of gas with a couple of cups of 5AM splurge coffee or most of my food budget for a week. It’s a significant amount to me. Plus I always have one dollar bills around for kid school lunches.
So now completely outside of my control someone decided to reduce my income by around $100 a month. Great. Thanks large Texas owned uncaring mega news corp, way to inspire the independant contractors who work for you. If I didn’t absolutely need the money so badly I would quit. Instead I’ll hang on and hope people are generous at Christmas time and start looking for something else I can do to get more money.

Monday, 23 Oct 2006

“When I was a Boy” - Dar Williams

Killing Moon - “Neuva Vague” (worth the listen)

“Life on Mars?” - Seu Jorge (from the LifeAquatic soundtrack)

Tuesday, 17 Oct 2006

Did you know different days are better than others for delivering the newspaper?

Monday - really good. the paper is so thin it’s easy and really quick to fold and stuff into bags and takes up no room at all in the car so I don’t even have to organize the papers I can just toss them into the cart, then again just toss them into the car. the only negative is that the paper is so light it’s difficult to aim well when throwing from a rapidly moving car. it just doesn’t have enough weight to cut through the air so it tends to deflect off the air careening off into random directions unless I slow down a lot.

Tuesday - perfect. still not much news so it’s easy to fold and stuff into bags and it’s compact, but there’s enough additional page weight to make the paper heavy enough to aim well. Probably my favorite day.

Wednesday - good. A normal sized paper, little thicker than Tuesday but still pretty close to ideal.
Thursday - Better by far than Sunday, but nowhere near as good as Tuesday or Wednesday. The paper is sometimes so fat  with added advertising or printed ads it’s hard to fold and sometimes it’s so fat it doesn’t even fit well in the normal sized bags, and it’s way too small for the next size bag. It also requires thought and time to pack into the car in an efficient manner.

Friday - generally good (not counting Fridays between Thanksgiving and xmas). Back to a wednesday sized paper.

Saturday - wouldn’t be bad except that on Saturdays I have to deliver another 100 papers on top of the 200+ I usually deliver. And since those 100 are interspersed with my normal papers I can’t just zip along the normal route I have 98% memorized, I have to keep checking the list to make sure I hit all the locations. For basic size packing speed though it’s not bad - definitely in the lighterweight class.

Sunday - 3x as much money per paper delivered but it’s deliverer hell. 3 FAT sections instead of 2 small ones, all but the front page are several times thicker than any normal day’s entire paper. A pain in the ass to fold and stuff. It takes a LONG time to fold and bag these pepers.  Even though there are fewer papers than during the week the paper is HUGE and heavy and takes two trips out to the car and fills the entire back and front passenger seats. It’s too heavy to throw one handed out the car window and almost everyone - even the people who are happy to get their weekly paper delivered in their driveway or on the lawn - want their paper on the top step at their front door on Sunday morning. Lazy people. Stopping and starting the car and getting in and out of the car 50 or so times in 2 hours is time consuming and not a whole lot of fun either.

Tuesday, 17 Oct 2006

working two jobs results in a fairly permanent state of never feeling caught up on sleep. not the usual “I am tired, but if I could sleep all day Sunday I could get rested up”, but the “I have to get up at 2:30AM every day of the week, I am never going to be rested again in my life” kind of not being caught up.

I’ve gotten good at delivering the papers in a timely fashion. What took me 3 hours the first couple of days (just the delivery part) now takes me about 1.5 hours on a good day, and the bagging has gone from 1.5 hours to about 30 minutes (on a good non-thursday day) so maybe that’s why I sometimes feel like it’s all a dream as I drive down dark roads deserted except for random route crossings by other paper carriers or the rare early morning walker or other night creature as startled to encounter me as I am it. it has it’s benefits - on a clear night the sky is gorgeous between 4-5AM. some nights the stars are so magnetic I think I could almost float up to them if I didn’t consciously think about staying on the ground. but lately I will think I am going to deliver to a house I am sure I have been delivering to but it’s not on the list, even when I go back to last week’s list it’s not there. houses I am POSITIVE I collected money from are not on the list as ‘carrier collect’ - and don’t appear to ever have been. concentration is difficult but daydreaming (can you call it daydreaming if it’s pitch black outsite and everyone but you and the people making the donuts are still sleeping?) comes easy. reality blurs in the predawn. daylight seems less real than the dark, crisp air and the bright starry sky.