John, age 50, has been a bike messenger longer than he'd like to remember, and has learned to take most of it in stride.

I started back in 1979. It's flexible, you know, you can take a day off whenever you want to, except when it rains. They may get annoyed with you if you don't show up when it rains. But you can pretty much make your own hours. I always had trouble getting up in the morning. But, I mean, you have to be a little bit accountable: in other words, if you show up at the same time every day, they can sorta predict when you're gonna show up.

The job itself can be demeaning in certain ways. Like they won't let you use the bathroom. A lot of companies, you ask them to use the bathroom, they say no. That's kind of inhuman, if you think about it. It's because messengers do a lot of stupid things like steal, and they make a bad name for the rest of us, those of us that don't steal.

This one guy got banned from a place, he was stealing so much when he went up there. They set him up one day: they let him use the bathroom and they went in after he left, and sure enough, he'd stolen everything out of the bathroom. Everything. Even the can of Lysol.

Sometimes you see the same guy, another messenger, every single day, for weeks on end. You pass him over and over and over again, and never even acknowledge each other. Some people take offense at that, they want you to stop, to say hello. And I'm not into that. I've got my game face on.

I've had sort of vendettas, guys who didn't like me and I didn't like them. Not that we ever tried to run each other off the road or anything. But you get into these kind of things where you just never talk to the guy, he did something to piss you off one day and you hold that as a grudge for 10 years.

There was this one guy, who for years really hated me, and I'm not sure what I ever did. And finally, I said, like, what's going on? And for some reason he was friendly to me that time, and now we're at least friendly. We wave. Maybe it's possible it might have all been in my head.