Miles Per Gallentine

My birthday, softball and Pride crammed into an epic weekend.

That’s just so much rump-shakin potential I can hardly handle it.

Dead Tree Delivery

When I was 13 years old I got a job as a paperboy delivering a local daily newspaper called the Kane County Chronicle. It was the first job I’d ever had and the first time I’d ever been expected to do something by someone other than my parents or teachers. One thing a lot of people don’t know is that by all objective standards, being a paperboy is one of the worst jobs imaginable, which is why newspapers have to resort to child labor to get it done. The deal was that I’d get 8 cents per paper I delivered. My particular route was the subdivision I lived in, which oscillated between 55 and 65 papers. Some quick napkin math reveals that’s a total haul of less than 5 dollars a day, but I was 13 and didn’t exactly have a lot of bill collectors breathing down my neck, so I took the job.

The bundled papers would come literally hot off the presses to my driveway at some obscene hour like 4am, along with the printed list of every subscriber’s address on the route. My papers were supposed to be delivered to homes by 6:30, something that probably never happened in the year and a half that I had the job. And say goodbye to sleeping in on the weekends. Inevitably, my father woke me around 5:30 after I had slept past my alarm clock. In his desire to get his paper with his cup of coffee before leaving for work, he had already brought the papers inside, snipped the yellow wire that held them in place and grabbed his copy off the stack. Outsourcing! I had made 8 cents before getting out of bed on most days. That will likely remain the easiest money I’ve ever made, but it went downhill quickly from there.

Rain or shine, snow or sleet, I rolled the papers up into the familiar plastic bags which these days are mostly used for picking up your dog’s feces. I’d then throw them into an elaborate front-and-back bag featuring a hole in the middle for my head and carrying space on both sides. This contraption is probably the reason I have back issues today. I’d hop on my bike and ride off into the dawn sunlight to sling some dead pieces of tree pulp.

After a couple months with this process, I could get my route down and complete the whole process in as little as 50 minutes. This was often a necessity if I was going to take a shower and be ready to catch the bus to school at 7:30. But in the beginning, it was brutal. Anyone who’s ever been a mailman or canvassed a neighborhood for a political campaign can attest that people generally REFUSE to display their addresses in a visible way. You have 60 addresses organized by street, and your job is to find all of them in the early morning light while dodging traffic, weather and the Chicago Tribune delivery guy who drove down our residential street doing at least 50 flinging copies of the much more substantially-sized Trib out his passenger window. At one point I ran into a parked car and broke my toe trying to avoid getting pegged in the head with one. The guy was a real jerk.

Needless to say, I tired of the job quickly. The only solace in having a paper route is the Christmas bonus. In mid-December I would get a bunch of “Thank You” cards and write out a message for all my subscribers that said, “Thanks for subscribing and have a Merry Christmas! – Your Chronicle Delivery Boy, Ryan.” (This was before the liberal war on Christmas, much simpler times.) I made sure to include my address, a simple yet crucial element. Then I’d neatly but conspicuously tuck them into the day’s paper so that it would be impossible to miss. Over the next few days/weeks, envelopes would appear in our mailbox with small sums of money addressed to me. With Christmas tips alone I’d make almost as much money as I did the entire year with the actual paper route.

I held the job for about 18 months, long enough to get my second Christmas season in, and promptly quit. I probably gave some bullshit excuse about how I was “heading to high school” and “needed to focus on schoolwork.” I really just wanted to sleep in. I look back on that job, the first of many weird and random jobs I’ve held over the last 13 years, and realize it taught me to take a certain amount of pride in my work. Even though I didn’t get paid very much, I liked the fact that people depended on me for a part of their morning routine. Having a regular paycheck was something that was rare in middle school. That first check with my name on it was a great feeling. My mom took me to the bank and we opened up my own checking account where I’d deposit my meager checks each month.

My point is there’s a certain dignity inherent in having a job, no matter how big or small it is. Like it or not, a jobs defines and validates us as productive members of society. Whenever people are out of work and don’t have prospects, weird stuff starts to happen. Rates of crime, drug use, and mental illnesses like blog writing all increase in times of high unemployment. I’m particularly familiar with the feeling since I’ve chosen a line of work – campaigns – that can best be described as white-collar migrant labor. Don’t get me wrong, I love the pace and camaraderie of campaigns. While it’s happening, it’s extremely exciting to be part of something larger than yourself. When I got my first political paycheck in the fall of 2007, I was positively giddy. I was getting paid to do something I would have done for free!  The downside is that there are long periods of un/underemployment in the time between election cycles. I’ve gotten better at handling it over the years, but it’s still a very frustrating and often emotional process. Going from working 80-100 hours a week and being part of something that’s making news to working zero hours a week and sleeping til noon is abrupt, and there’s no guarantee of where you’ll find work next.

The lifestyle isn’t for everyone. In fact it’s only for a few crazy people. But those crazy people are some of the smartest, most inspiring people I’ve ever met, and those are the people who always keep me coming back for more. It’s like a caffeine headache, and the only solution is to drink more coffee. The campaign lifestyle is not very well understood by people outside the campaign world. My dad even recommended that I not tell people in non-political interviews the kinds of hours I worked because they might think I was lying or exaggerating. It’s such a niche job that I’ve found it tough to explain to people in the private sector how my campaign skills translate – but they do! If I ever start a business and I’m looking for smart young people who will put it silly hours to make things go smoothly, I’m going to hire a former field organizer. They’re the best employees you can get. That’s no joke.

Most of the time it’s the small things that get to me about unemployment. When someone asks me what I do for a living, I’d love to give a simple answer instead of a 300 word paragraph about whatever hustle I’m trying to work on currently. I know it’s petty, and in the long run it will be a short blip in the span of my career, but for now it’s very frustrating.

Maybe the Trib needs a local delivery guy? I can drive fast and I have no tolerance for kids on bikes!