These are my experiences starting out as a bicycle messenger. Today was my first paid day working for Mercury, who are one of the companies under the corporate umbrella of C.T.I. in Perth, Australia.

On Monday (yesterday) I just shadowed a messenger for half a day to learn the ropes and try to get a handle on how it works. I guess it was also a chance to back out if the whole experience freaked me out, which it didn't. Instead I sped down to Crumpler to buy myself a messenger bag.

So today I turned up at 8.30am, picked up my uniform and walked into the radio room to pick up a radio and pager. Mercury use a system where they page you a job and you keep in contact via the radio, unlike some companies which do everything via the radio. This was great in practise for a beginner as I could refer to the pages whenever I forgot something.

The day started out slowly with a few easy runs up St. Georges Terrace to get the feel for it and to figure out how to fill out the paperwork. At first it took me ages and I had to keep referring to my pager to fill out the job forms but after a while I got the hang of it. I think getting to grips with the routine, which order to fill out forms and check pager details will be one of the most important things to learn.

I've been riding my old Avanti MTB rather than put my lovely Cannondale F800 through the rigours of daily messenger life. Having it stolen would really upset me. That Avanti isn't too shabby though and I've switched saddles with the Cannondale to make it more comfortable. I'm ordering various parts to spruce it up a bit too, LX HollowTech II cranks, 9 Speed LX Cassette, SRAM chain, LX brake levers and shifter pods, as well as a set of XT v-brakes.

Here's an image of my Crumpler bag. They make loads of excellent bags including some really nice laptop semi-hard cases.

I'll post a bit more about day 2 tomorrow, right now I imagine it will be a battle against muscle fatigure and tiredness as I'm feeling pretty shattered right now. If you want to leave a comment I always appreciate it, unfortunately the comments system appears to be broken so I can't reply easily, the first comment will appear and possibly the second but no more.