It's the first really warm spring day of the year. The afternoon sun is reflecting off the office building across the street and making it glow golden. Jobs have been stopped for the day, and I'm sitting with my bike in the car park in front of the Nest (our office). A few of my male colleagues have gathered to watch me, the courier, change the brake pads and clean my bike. It must be very interesting for them to see that someone with breasts can do the same things they can.
In the dispatch room, the two-headed “Borracho” and “La Misa” are arguing loudly about how to make the company grow. So that one day they can really pay us properly? No. I think talking about work all the time is just their fetish. But if you love what you do, why would you talk about anything else?
“El Niño” storms into the dispatch room with new ideas. From the sunny world outside I hear all three of them talking about new customers, expansion and golden combinations (when jobs can be delivered in particularly beautiful sequences). “The District Officer” comes up from the “Cave”, our big underground warehouse, balancing far too many wine crates for a mere mortal, but for her it's an ordinary working day. She interrupts the heated debate in dispatch with a well-aimed joke, and the discussion drifts out to us in the sunshine, the bodies following it. My bike is reasonably clean and my brakes work again.
I wipe the grease off my hands and join my colleagues on the asphalt, a cold beer in my hand. We look at the building across the street, the sun in our faces. I love this work. I love my colleagues. I love our bikes and the freedom of the street. A perfectly ordinary day in our bike courier collective: a symphony of grease, steel and passion.
“Little Bird #35” is part of CROW, the worker-run bike collective that has set itself the goal of replacing cars with bikes: through cargo bike deliveries and bike repairs, for a better quality of life for everyone and without bosses. At CROW people have constantly changing nicknames (but fixed numbers), and those are what this column uses. It's up to you to get to know us and guess who is who.