RadDog

I made a decent living riding a bike.

I was a bike messenger in San Francisco for 5 years....this was during the 80's before email/Internet when businesses needed lightening fast deliveries for projects that were under time pressure.

3 or 4 died each year. Everyone wanted to be a messenger, but few made it. The workload was brutal if you wanted to make good money.

I started working for one of the big bike messenger companies making $50 a day. However, my reputation for speed eventually resulted in me making more than $170 a day, a lot of money at the time.


I was a mediocre BMX and road racer, but I had a unique set of skills that made me one of the fastest messengers in the city. The problem was most messenger companies wanted volume, medium speed for most deliveries and short distances. Also, you only got 40% of the delivery charge (called a tag) and had to pay fees back to the company.

We had a competition every year, and one of them was the fastest messenger to do a delivery from one end of San Francisco to the next. I won in 8 minutes and 43 seconds in heavy traffic. There was an article in the newspaper about it.

One night I was at a party. A guy who owned a typography company was complaining that he could not get his work out and back fast enough, even though he paid for the most expensive rush delivery (and from a company I had worked for, US Messenger). By the time he called it in it would take an hour or more. I asked what he was looking for. He said "I need it there in 30 minutes." I said "how about 9 minutes," and the next day gave him the article.

The following Monday I started working for him making that delivery nearly 20 times a day. The delivery company charged him $12:50 each time, and workers would get 40%. I got the whole tag.