Gig workers come with built-in ADD

 This fall, our shop rat moved on to higher paying gigs. We even upgraded his title to Respected Repair Rodent, but the prestige was not enough to overcome our meager pay scale.

Shop rat also served as lab rat for my grossly amateur sociological observations. Based on a totally random sample of one home-schooled teenager, added to broad generalizations and jumbled recollections of other part time coworkers, I reached the stunningly predictable conclusion that someone working multiple jobs will have trouble paying full attention to any of them.

The type of job makes a difference. Specialty retail means working in a toy store for a certain target clientele. Part time workers who enter that realm probably have some degree of personal interest. In the bike business, intense interest can lead to frustration and a quick departure, if the shop's customer balance doesn't provide enough outlet for the enthusiast's personal satisfaction. For instance, a shop in a nearby town, run by a hard-core mountain biker, had to cater to the full range of bike shop customers, which made it hard for the owner to keep mechanics who only wanted to work on the cool stuff. The majority of repair work in most bike shops does not focus on the cool stuff.

Side note here: the cool stuff is much more time consuming and precise to service than repair work on the contemptibly primitive machines scorned by the technolemmings. Forced to find a balance between an hourly rate that actually covers the overhead and a competitive price that attracts customers, shops probably make a lot less money on high dollar repairs for tech addicts compared to tune-ups and traditional services on simpler machines.

Even a good and interested Respected Repair Rodent is likely to have distractions, since the role often attracts school-age youth in their first jobs. Our previous trainee was a sponsored young racer still in high school. He rated everything on the basis of athletic challenge, but having been in bike racing from a very young age, he also understood and respected the machine itself. After high school he went on to join the Marine Corps because it appeared to offer the most satisfying athletic challenge among the services vying to recruit him. His first choice was rescue swimmer for the Navy, but he just barely failed the eye test. The bureaucracy made it needlessly complicated to retake the test. His distractions from work consisted not only of academic needs as he worked toward graduation, but also his training days, first with the Navy pre-induction group, then preparing for the Marine Corps test. Bike racing does not provide complete fitness.

We do have an unlikely part timer who had only ridden a bike much before he was old enough to drive, and never took an interest by the later forms. His main thing is climbing. Our shop is not a pure bike shop. Cross-country skiing during the Telemark ski craze merged with a lot of mountaineering technique and technology through back-country skiing, and the local tourist economy favors a bit of light hiking merchandise. We have been able to offer the climber access to deals on gear for his primary interest. In return, he has mastered a range of bike skills, and is willing to cover a couple of crucial days of the week reliably.

The masters of the financial universe have decreed that workers shall be insecure, and that many shall stitch together their incomes from multiple sources. As a result, workers don't feel invested in the success of any company, and they pick their favorites to receive anything approaching their full attention. Management has been trying to make labor obsolete since the dawn of industrialization. Labor-saving devices aren't meant to ease the crushing physical burdens on the toiling masses. They're purely meant to reduce payroll expenses. Management may frame your layoff as the gift of free time. "Now you can go find that dream job, or start your own small business! Don't think of this as the terrifying revocation of your financial lifeline! Think of it as an opportunity for self-actualization."

Motherf*ckers who moved your cheese want to give you a cheesy book about adapting to changing times, when the aspiring autocrats haven't evolved their outlook toward the general population for centuries, if not millennia. Their cheese is well aged and fully protected.

Evolution is not survival of the fittest. It's survival of the most adaptable. When it comes to humans, however, that really means survival depends on being able to use intelligence and ingenuity to repair the consequences of massive group stupidity. We have faced mostly self-created problems for centuries. Disease challenges us because pathogens evolve. Weather challenges us, but its intensity has increased because of greed and obstinacy. Our mania for "productivity" keeps us gouging and gashing at the earth in a frenzied grab to exploit resources for profit, when profit exists nowhere in nature. Other than that, interpersonal conflicts at every level are humans creating problems for other humans.

In my own working life, I have tried to maintain space for self expression that I hoped would become marketable. The financial channels that irrigate the creative world have changed drastically over those years. I never managed to put more than a small siphon into the main reservoir at the best of times. Regardless of the near certainty of poverty and obscurity, I haven't been able to reconcile myself to shutting up completely. I can add my own lived experience to the profile of the distracted gig worker. 

Drawing on the example of friends of mine who make things, I did try to take jobs in areas that interested me, so that I could earn while I learn. They had practical skills in mechanics and machining, so they fared better financially. I didn't always manage to score the most interesting part time jobs, and they typically paid as little as an employer could get away with paying. Paying as little as an employer can get away with paying is Payroll 101. Pay as little as possible for any service. That may not mean taking the lowest bid, if a little more money will bring in someone less likely to incur extra costs by making stupid mistakes, but it will always be as little as the employer can be forced to pay.

For a super small business like our shop, the entire pay range is limited by the gross revenues of the business itself. This time of year, with its Small Business Saturday, and admonitions to support small businesses helps very little when the economy remains stacked against small businesses at all. You can't send a flood of customers to a struggling business and expect a miraculous recovery. Look at what happened to the bike industry in the Covid surge: an already struggling industry, further crippled by the pandemic's attack on production and delivery, had nothing to sell to the suddenly interested public until the public had moved on a year later.

There's more insecurity than security in the economy that real people inhabit. People are really good at seeing only what is right in front of them, so an individual who is doing well will not look to the dark precipice just coming into view. A successful person in the moment will scorn the less successful and relegate them to their fates.

Trainee, and memories of Mr. Rat

Days after our summer part-timer departed for his real grown-up job in the far north of New York, a young racer in town was suddenly inspired to apply.

Where the departing rider was the classic 54cm-frame kind of roadie, this kid is more on the lines of Miguel Indurain. He's 6'2" and says he started riding at age 8. This actually gives him two years' head start on Big Mig, whose Wikipedia write-up says he started at 10. Now he's a junior in high school, and has achieved some level of mentorship, if not sponsorship, with actual coaching.

Listening in on his interview with upper management, I gathered that his duties may include inventory stuff on the computer rather than only mechanical work. But he said that he loves cleaning bikes. He will find plenty to do with the cruddy messes that people drag in for our attention. He's the closest thing to a shop rat* to come through here in years. He's more of an enhanced shop rat, but at least he doesn't think he's too good to sweep a floor or empty a garbage can.

This being New England, his other sport is cross-country skiing. If he sticks around, he will spend a lot of time with the waxing iron. With luck, he'll be slinging a lot of rentals, as well.

His first day went well. He put in some time out front with the computer system and in back with the grime. And he actually came back for a second day. Now he's been at it for a couple of weeks.

The fact that the management makes up for the chronic low pay and cruddy work by letting employees buy at wholesale is a powerful attraction for regular riders, especially young racers thrashing their equipment in hope of making a name for themselves while they're still young enough to  matter. His team affiliation does not extend to a gravy train of equipment. He's practically a privateer.

His recent race results have ranged from a first place finish in the A group in the nearby training series -- on a day when the biggest guns were not on hand, but still an A group victory -- to a humbling last place in a stage race in Vermont, where the insanely fit and well supported teams showed up. I'm sure this kid could have dropped me like an empty water bottle even when I was in my prime. But that's the cruel revelation of racing. You meet the people who are impossibly faster than you are. You think you're training to your limit, and you come up against these people from another planet. It literally happened to the best of us when Art the Dart, dominator of the Virginia District of what was then USCF, went to the nationals and was anonymous field fodder. There's always someone to chase, until you get to the very tip of the peloton, where everyone is chasing you.

Mechanically, the trainee is hindered by a teenager's tendency to overlook details, and the unfamiliarity of certain basic tool and mechanical principles. But he's a willing pupil, so he has that in his favor. I was much more of an idiot at that age, and for a depressing number of years thereafter. He has already started to broaden his perception of the universe of bikes by having to put a wrench on stuff that was made before he was born, and on cheap department store crap, not just on the bikes he owns for competition.

*Some might think that the term shop rat is a pejorative, or at least demeaning of the unskilled aspirants who often fill the role. I actually came up with the title when I worked in a shop where the young helper was named Jeff Mraz. He would sign his name in a rapid scrawl, first initial and last name, so that it looked like J. Mr. Rat. I started calling him J Rat. He was a very talented BMX rider, who liked to do tricks on and off the curb edge around the shopping center where our shop was located. He especially liked to do tail whips into trash cans, until we pointed out that he'd bent his frame doing that. Then he took an interest in road racing, built himself a road bike, and competed as a junior a few times. I don't know what he did after that. He was developing mechanical skills, and had an interest in custom auto body work, as I recall. Only later did I notice that the term "shop rat" was already in common usage. Just another example of parallel evolution yielding a widely duplicated result.