Up to this
(*)
point I thought you were talking about bike messengers. But I think they run on takeout pizza
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as a once Seattle bicycle messenger, i can say it was espresso and bagels that fueled me and many of my comrades (with the occasional Uncle Seth’s pink-frosted sugar cookies!)
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Nothing to replace lost fluids from exercising like a refreshing isotonic espresso!
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Are bike couriers still an actual thing? When I worked in central London in the 90s and 00s, they were all over everything. A bike courier was one of the heroes of William Gibson’s “Virtual LIght”. I have the impression that e-signing and fast network capacity has made couriers a more specialist occupation nowadays.
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I see more couriers with boxes, cargo bikes, than old school ones nowadays. So rather than carrying one set of papers swiftly they are taking a bankers box style cargo.
Not in London though.
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no idea about today. i was a Seattle bike messenger in the 90s, as well… we were radio dispatched - not even cell phones or any other PDA device. possibly the most fun job i ever had!
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You see a lot more e-cargo bikes around nowadays. At least, I do in Oxford. It’s more often actual goods deliveries than courier services, though.
While you could obviously transport quite large quantities of blood by e-bike, the advantage of the drones is a 24-hour service to swiftly carry fairly small samples to the lab. It’s the difference between transporting a transport organ and a DNS swab.
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I immediately thought of Night-Gaunts.
NIGHT-GAUNTS
By HP Lovecraft
Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings,
They come in legions on the north wind’s swell
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,
Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare’s well.
Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lake
Where the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But ho! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!
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I am confident that the scriptwriters of “Wellington Paranormal” are on it.
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That looks tasty but I am not going all the way to Iceland for it.
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Order a meal to be delivered in London and the chances are it will be dropped off by a cyclist with a modified ebike (who has risked life and limb to get there, to be paid a lot less than a living wage, for some reason a lot are Brazilian).
There are very few couriers and DRs anymore, no money in it and little demand. But you can sometimes see these guys.
On the subject of modified ebikes
[70mph is more the preserve of the rich and stupid; Deliveroo and Just Eat riders can and do get up to 30]
I am often in the flightpath area at weekends, I look forward to unexpected showers.
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It’s - unique and entirely mad.
Half fizzy synthetic orange, half malt drink.
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If only they’d built the extension to the post office railway, we could have added a couple of stations on that to ferry the samples back and forth:
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