dreamdasher

It’s been 3 years since I’ve quit my job. Probably time for another one of those update posts. 

But not today!

You may recall that a few summers ago I delivered food on my bike. Haven’t done it since. But I’ve been thinking about it lately, for a variety of reasons.

If you remember, I cited some reasons why I stopped doing it; low pay, almost getting creamed by cars, breathing exhaust fumes. Those were definitely some reasons. But there was more to it, which have been bouncing around in the back of my head. Mostly, it was just damn depressing.

Back then.

When I first retired in early 2022, I took nearly a year off paid work. It was nice, highly recommend. But then a confluence of factors motivated me to scrape together some side gigs. 

A big one was a general feeling of scarcity when transitioning from saving money to withdrawing money. This was mostly subconscious at the time, but in retrospect this was a larger factor than I admitted to myself. 

I’m pretty good at self-deception.

I guess I wanted to prove to myself that I could make some money if need be. The market at the time was not super encouraging either. 

Then there was the social; like most FIRE peeps, I’m more introverted than not. But I missed interacting with people, and I also missed feeling like I was a part of something.

And then there was the tax optimization, and how some provisions required me to have a little earned income. Wrote a whole post about that one. 

All that added up, and off I went on a not-so epic journey to make money by riding around my city like a crazy person. 

Thanks to Kevin Ha, I had a well-worn blueprint of how to optimize the food-delivery apps. I bought 20 bucks of gear he recommended, and downloaded the employee version of doordash and uber eats. Easy to get on those; they’ll onboard any barely conscious entity.

At the time, I lived in the ‘burbs 15 minutes outside the urban core of our city. Both apps won’t let you deliver on bike unless you’re inside the core, so before getting all crazy with my bike, I figured I’d test out the apps delivering via car near where I lived.

I did this once. It sucked.

Drove a total of 30 minutes, made $5.75. And that’s 1099 cash. Doesn’t count the gas or wear and tear on my car; even with my cheap-ass prius that’s still making a dent. I was on the app for over an hour. Only go the one meal run, despite it being during the supposed lunch rush. Definitely not getting close to minimum wage on that one. Promised myself to never do the car version of the food delivery game. 

Oh well, off to the bike.

Drove my car downtown for the lunch rush, got my bike off the rack, and started up the apps. Off I went. Much better; following Kevin’s advice I earned progressively more. By using two apps at the same time, I would pick up multiple orders from restaurants close together, and only take orders that were going in the same direction. As I got better at this, so did my earnings. 

The first time I delivered on bike, I made $8.25 an hour. The last time I was up to $18.67 an hour. Not bad. I think if I kept at it, I could have approached $25-30 an hour. Keep in mind that this was only for 2-3 hours a day, as the lunch rush lasted that long. The dinner rush may have been better, but I wasn’t skipping meals with the fam. 

The time between the rushes was nearly pointless; maybe get one order an hour, if that. Did that a couple of times before I completely constrained my work to lunch standard.

But man, it was fucking depressing.

Look, I for sure liked getting paid to speed around the city on bike. That was cool. And while some people were dicks, most people were happy for me to bring them food. Also nice. It did feel good to get people something they needed. But there was the dark side of it, which reminded me just a little too much of my last job.

Underworld (sans Beckinsale)

Some nights as a cop I’d watch the sun go down at the local fire station with the hose jockeys and paramedics. Our professions were fun, mind-numbing, fulfilling, and soul murdering. Occasionally we’d talk about the underworld, the root cause of much of our jobs; this was a term one of the medics coined years ago. She said we were witness to the plumbing of the underworld, a world most people don’t see. Where the sausage is made in the dark, and everyone else likes to pretend it doesn’t exist.

The constant pain and suffering of people, most of whom are barely able to function in society, took up most of our time. The medics would take them to the hospital when they’d OD, or their prescription meds stopped working. The firefighters would rip them out of their old, beat up cars after their brakes failed on the way to the midnight shift at the distribution center. We’d fight them when they’d get drunk and start breaking windows in an unguided attempt to lash out at a world that didn’t make sense to them. Many were homeless, addicted, mentally ill, or some combination of all that. Many weren’t any of those, but clearly fell within the first quartile of the intelligence distribution. Those people just couldn’t seem to get ahead, bad decisions compounded, and a niche market (pay day loans, fast food, high interest credit cards, etc) seemed incentivized to keep them where they were. 

We’d cart these people to shelters, hospitals, jails, the morgue. The same people, over and over. 

We spent most of our time with these people. Occasionally a “regular” person would enter our orbit. Somebody of average intelligence, good decision-making skills, would be out walking their dog and get hit by a truck. But that was rare. Most of the time we’d be responding to the never ending 911 calls pertaining to people proper society forgets about. It felt like our job was to both look after these people, and to keep them out of sight. 

They’re still people though, and regardless of their bad decisions, it burned my soul to watch them suffer. To watch them die. Gallows humor was a good respite, but fleeting.

What the fuck has all that got to do with door dash? Well, lemme tell you.

Classes.

In my city, there are two classes of restaurants, and two corresponding classes of delivery people. (obligatory disclaimer about false dichotomy, spectrums, blah blah blah. It’s for real two distinct classes here.)

1. Hipster joints, or whatever they’re calling themselves these days.

Local restaurants don’t use doordash or uber. They have private agreements with a guild of bike couriers to deliver their organic ethically sourced avocado gruel. 

2. Chains. Only the franchises and corporate places use the app based delivery drivers in my city.

The hipster joints are where I prefer to eat, and to keep costs real they employ the guild. These bikers are riding retro fixies or carbon racers, with clipless pedals and urban armor. They’ve cut out the apps so bikers and the restaurants can keep more cash. 

The bikers are a hodgepodge of college kids, recent grads doing a gap year, or ex-corporate types in the midst of a mid-life crisis. Guess I fitted in with the latter. They all seemed cool yet stand-offish in their stylish skinny jeans and chuck taylors with cleats screwed into them. Guarded of their gig. Would look at me sideways; I seemed more in place with them than the app based riders-maybe I was trying to scab on their turf? One of them eventually talked to me at the central park we all waited for orders at. Said I could probably get in on the guild; they get a W-2 and decent bennies. If I’d stuck around the bike delivery business, this would have been the smart play. But then, I didn’t. 

Then there were the chains which used the apps. Mostly drivers, not many bike riders. Different class; ie, lower. Me and some dude who reminded me of a guy I used to lock up when he was off his meds were the only white guys in this class. Got to use my Spanish quite a bit. We’d all queue up at whatever chain had orders, and grab sacks of food from the restaurant workers of similar backgrounds. Beat up old cars would be double-parked outside, along with a few huffys and other rusted out wal-mart brand bikes. It looked like the walking dead in there; clear that most of these people were either completely relying on gig work to put food on the table and putting in the long hours which that required. Or this was what they were doing in their off hours from their main gig instead of sleeping. Some said they worked at a fast food restaurant at night, grab an hour of shut-eye, then do this while the kids were at school. Fucking miserable. Felt guilty that every run I took was cash out of their pocket. And here I am, with shit tons of money doing this….for fun? What kind of dickhead am I? Realizing this was one major reason for stopping, though I had a hard time putting words to the feeling until recently.  

Then there was the ridiculousness of the deliveries. I had a pretty regular one where I’d grab sacks of panera, then take it to the cube farms next door. Less than a 2-minute walk, would just leave the bike parked. I’d ring through security, and some clearly unhealthy zombified corporate type would grab their sack of carbs. They were always nice, grateful for sustenance, and looked like whatever they were laboring at under the fluorescent lights was slowly eating away at them. I just wanted to scream, “Go get your food yourself!!! Escape this hellhole for at least a few minutes, get some sun and some fucking steps!!!” But then, who am I to judge? Maybe they couldn’t leave. Maybe they only had 30 seconds to spare between zoom meetings and crushing debt. Fuck. 

All that reminded me of working the underworld those years back. Seeing how this fucked up cycle works; barely paid people with few choices make the food, delivered by similar people, to miserable people who make lots of money but no time to spend it. A whole system which few think about. The food just shows up at your door. Tip your driver. Move on with life. Is that driver missing dinner with their family for five measly bucks? Maybe. We’re all missing something. 

I didn’t want to continue working in this system in my last job, and I for sure wasn’t going to spend my newfound freedom working in a similar system. Took my money and ran. 

I own the companies which drive all of this. The relentless pursuit of profit provides my life of luxury which is made off of these people’s backs, all the way from the fields to the cube farm. Not that I’ve got a better idea; seems like the alternatives didn’t fare much better. So what to do?

These thoughts ran through my mind for quite some time. Along with other factors, it led me to where I am today. In school again, trying to learn how to help people caught in these systems. So far the solutions presented are partial, some seem idealistic and divorced with reality. But it’s better than nothing. There are worse ways to spend the next few decades of my life.

I say all of this as a reminder to myself. You see, I occasionally go through this cycle of jealousy and desire. I earned $100k one year during my full-time working years. That’s a shit ton of money. I amassed a respectable FI stache. But the rest of those working years, I made way less than that. 

Occasionally I’ll happen through the FI space, and see somebody making multiples of my best year. And I can’t help but feel my career choices were flawed; entitlement creeps in, and I wonder why the hell I risked so much for so little. Then I think….shit, I could re-tool, and jump into a more lucrative field and get mine. Ten more years of grinding, and I could be in the super-fat FIRE realm.  Stick it to this fucked up system, get another comma in there. 

This thought loop doesn’t last long. I remember the underworld, and the system I’d be jumping back into. The people who suffer under my boot heel. Sure, maybe I could get in at the upper range of pay this time. But I’d still be trading my time, and little pieces of my soul, for something which I know won’t make me any happier. 

And thus I go back to committing myself to spending what time I have left trying to make this place a little less shitty. There are obviously a lot of issues with that, but I can think of nothing better to do. More of the same, on and on. Gotta keep trying, even if I occasionally run my head through a wall. 

So it goes.