Different Hours

Well, after a long absence it's nice to be home again. Had a good trip back east but it's always nice when you walk in to your own house. We just missed the biggest storm of winter here in No Cal. Cars floating away, flooding, mudslides, tremendous wind and rain. I was sure that I'd come home to find a) A tree on top of my house or b) the business under 3 feet of water. My house was safe, but the storm knocked out the phone service to a 5 block area around the office. It's difficult to run a messenger service without the benefit of phones. SBC/Pac Bell were their usual helpful selves by not telling us what the problem was when they knew what it was. Eventually we got our lead phone line forwarded to a cell phone and have been able to survive since that first day in a gerry rigged kind of way. Pain in the ass. I guess it could be worse. Our ground floor office could have flooded as happened to many residences and businesses. I'll be glad when winter is over. It's so much easier for the bikes when the weather doesn't suck. The drivers aren't impacted so much, but they are alot busier. The thing about courier services is that there's not alot of client loyalty outside of your biggest accounts. The big accounts tend not to leave because they usually owe you money and are wary of another company being prepared to handle their volume. But the smaller accounts will leave you as soon as say hi on the street. That's why the phone situation was so stressful. Client calls, can't get through, calls someone else, starts using them and forgets about you. Fickle bastards but thems the breaks. I think we successfully dodged the bullet for the most part with this outage.

In other news my league basketball team is now 4-2. We've won 4 straight after losing our first 2. There's nothing like the competitive spirit of aging athletes.

It was nice to get back on the bike after being out of town for so long. Everything is so sodden that using some of my sneaky urban trail short cuts to get to work was pretty much out of the question. It was kind of refreshing to take a different route though. Felt pretty strong on the 2 speed despite having limited riding time over the last few months. I must say after a trip away from the bay area the view of San Francisco when riding over the GG Bridge is fairly awesome, especially with the dramatic clouds that the recent storms have left us with. It's the little things that make me happy.