9 O'Clock Shadow

9 August - Had my first taste of the messenger world of Sydney today with a runaround with Crisis. Rocked up to the coffee shack at 1 Farrer Place and awaited the arrival of Sam, No 222, who took a ways to get there. Had a bit of a chat with some of the others - didn’t know what this guy was supposed to look like so I asked a couple if they were Sam, one retort was a haughty, 'I don't take shadows, mate' - well, if you're going to be like that ... He eventually turned up and my task was to just follow him around (shadow) for a couple of hours and try to pick up how it worked. Well, when I train a new biker inever showed off by running reds and going straight into turning traffic - not 10m in and he was almost wiped out by a taxi - not that i'm complaining but a little restraint please mate. The tools are a bit more high tech than Novex but it's pretty simple, had no trouble keeping up but I do think its going to take a while to get to know Sydney well (the street numbers are pretty random and even though its my home town its a bit of a maze and good routing sense does take time). Sam mainly does a route from one client which is pretty easy work so it didn’t give me a good sense of what i'll expect but it did get me on the road and hopefully I should be starting pretty soon, I don’t know if i'll be clawing my way to the top for a while but for the moment the prospects seem okay. Afterwards went to the dentist for the first time in over a year, was paranoid that my teeth were falling out of my skull but the dentist assured me that everything seemed okay, still not flossing regularly but apart from that nothing too much to worry about (the way I see it starting to floss is as hard as stopping to smoke - so i'm doing two things bad right now). Mosied around in the afternoon for a while doing random things before heading off to the AB for a photoshoot for some local rags and media releases - all very amusing and helped out by liberal doses of booze from our good host, James. I just hope the punters don’t wonder why the hotel with two bars and multiple spaces is full of hundreds of people who are all clones of only 12 (albeit very attractive) people ...