Thursday, October 9, 2008

what about the dispatcher?

well...as you may or may not know, today was bike messenger appreciation day. our company set up a basket with apples, candy, chocolate, and silly stuff like that for the cats that came to work. not much but a nice gesture. i punched in and made my way to my desk and logged into my computer.

everything seemed ok until i logged on to the bike board...wtf?!! work all over the place with the first page of work slowly making itself red. whats red? red is bad...very bad. it doesn't quite mean that it's late but it definitely doesn't mean we have a great chance of making the package on time. turns out that most of the crew decided to take messenger appreciation day as a holiday. from 8 to 11 or so we had about 4 cats...thats right FOUR! the car board was asking us for helpers and all we did was laugh at them. do you people know how big chicago is?! you can't cover the damn city with only four bikers. thats just ridiculous.

well, there we were, patiently sitting and waiting for our riders to show up. minutes turned into hours and nothing. thank God we at least had four cats to work with...at about 9ish i got a call from 6706...

6706...o-6, o-6.

j.dot...yo, what up? good morning.

6706...hey, im good to go at the thompson center. i just finished being appreciated.

...after he called me i was hoping the rest of the crew was taking advantage of the breakfast cdot set up for the bike messengers of chicago. that wasn't the case. o-6 took advantage of it but the rest...well, they f*cked us over. turns out bike messenger appreciation day = f*ck your dispatcher as hard as possible day. slowly the calls started coming in..."where's my package? when are they going to pick up my package? whats going on today?" we had no answers except to let everyone know that we were short staffed today.

well, we did what we could with the soldiers that showed up to play in traffic. slowly they started showing up but only because management started calling them at home...ha! i didn't tell them to call them but they knew we were in trouble if we didn't. im glad they did. by 1400 we finally leveled out. work slowed up again and instead of it being crazy it was just steady. we were even able to help the car board out a bit.

sometimes i love my crew but today wasn't one of those days. today the love/hate struggle with messengers continued. i won't forget the cats that showed up to help. i also won't forget the cats that showed up late or didn't show up. it doesn't make any sense...it was beautiful out. not too hot, not too cold, sun shinning, and, well, perfect. i should have known by the weather that something was wrong. for now i leave you today...not with my usual "peace" but with...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

yeah... one day of the year we are given some appreciation. oh my god some packages were late!!!! you and all the other people in your office will make more $ per year off us 'soldiers' than we can dream of. take that finger and stick it where...you know.

j.dot said...

some? i think it was more than some. it actually isn't that big of a deal i was just going for the extreme. me and scott just sit there reading books or the internet while we wait for cats to show up or clean up. not much we can do anyway. either way, im sure the cats that did show appreciated the work.

now...more money than you can dream of? seriously? you must not have big dreams cause i don't make d*ck! sh*t...we sometimes can view the payroll and let it be known that this dispatcher doesn't quite make the same amount of loot that some of our soldiers do. sh*t...sometimes i feel like i should be riding but then i realize that it's give and take. my body hates the sh*tty weather.

your move anonymous...peace.