World Underwater Basketweaving Championships.

Sounds ridiculous right?

So did the Cycle Messenger World Championships to me back in 1998 when I saw a 20 second blip about them on Channel 10.

Bike Messengers have competitions? Who'd have thought.

I never would have guessed I'd end up participating in them in Copenhagen, Edmonton, Sydney and Tokyo, as well as National Championships in Montreal, San Francisco, and Melbourne.

This year it's Gautemala's turn.

If you are, were or wanted to be a bike courier, Stevil paints a very colourful picture of the workplace, and it'd be fair to say that we share some common workplace traits.

Back in the day (not the fixed gear back in the day, which was April, but the real time, with only a hint of irony back in the day) when I was a bicycle messenger, my dispatcher barked today's post title at me over the radio. I assume it to mean that once I got moving on whatever banal subject happened to be my flavor of the day, it was impossible for him to break in and actually call out jobs.

I of course wasn't the only one who was guilty of using airtime for my own forum however. As my company's team captain Andy once said, "they send a bunch of kids out all over the city on bicycles with high powered radios. What do they expect would happen?" This was a time when the irony of mullets was still thick, and as such, any time someone saw a really good one, they would announce it to all who had their ears on. If there was a particularly good deal on sandwiches at some random deli for example, this was just as important as the dispersal of jobs. Generally messenger companies operate with one dispatcher to a small number of riders, but the way we worked was a system called 'free call', (not to be mistaken for 'free ball' which is another conversation all together) wherein one dispatcher would read a laundry list of jobs to all messengers employed by the six-odd companies that operated out of the office. Each messenger would build a run, but if another messenger called for a job that was from another company's client, the rider employed by that company could call them off the job and so on.