One of the jobs you won’t see on my LinkedIn profile is that of bicycle messenger in NYC. This experience gave me a better understanding of why women are entrusted with continuing the species. Clearly young men for some reason believe they are bulletproof, and shouldn’t be trusted to breed Sea Monkeys, but I digress.

Now I admit that I missed the big money of the messenger salad days, when hardened riders were clearing $700 a week (or so they claimed) and I came to the game post-FAX machine, BUT, I still got an amazing daily workout, made some scratch and got to see New York City in all its grime and glory aboard my beat up messenger bike.

And it was glorious, until your bike got stolen. Which it always did. And brings me to the point of this post.

I imagine the NYPD sting operations that might have happened on the downtown NYC black market for hot bicycles (you could go scout 14th and Ave. A for your stolen ride) had the technology backbone existed and this nifty locator been around. Kudos to the writers at Urban Daddy for writing up BikeSpike:

“Imagine you’ve pulled over for a hamburger somewhere along the Beltline. Maybe a nice glass of iced tea. Then imagine you getting a notification on your phone that your bike is being tampered with. That’s when you run outside and yell, “Hey, rapscallion. That’s mine.” And if you’re too late: it’ll automatically track its whereabouts so you can follow it and alert the authorities.”

Rapscallions indeed.

After my messenger bike was pinched (I arrived at the spot where my bike had been locked to find only the broken U-lock where my steel framed Peugot 12-speed had been tethered), I started working in the dispatch office at the messenger agency, mainly because I could type (and speak the King’s English), so my daily death-defying adventures were behind me.

I still love to ride and hit Critical Mass whenever my schedule allows.

Be safe out there!