WASHINGTON, JANUARY 2, 2017: DONALD TRUMP TO REPORTERS: "IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING IMPORTANT, WRITE IT OUT AND HAVE IT DELIVERED BY COURIER, THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, BECAUSE I’LL TELL YOU WHAT, NO COMPUTER IS SAFE.”
I never woulda predicted how a new President would affect my chosen profession. Not in a kazillion years.
When I first started bein’ a bike messenger in D.C. back in the ‘80s, I couldn’t even begin to pedal fast enough to keep up with the business. Messages and packages was flyin’ all over the place, and we must’ve had fifty guys workin’ at just my company alone. And there was dozens of outfits, let me tell you.
Then in the ‘90s the computer showed up, email came in, and the all the tires went flat, if you get my metaphor. Overnight. By last year, we was down to just legal crap—papers that ya had to get signed and notarized—gift packages to the politicians’ girlfriends, and the occasional envelope stuffed with cash from K Street. There were about six of us left. We were a dyin’ breed, like the dinosaurs.
And then Trump gets in. This is where the irony comes in, ‘cause he won because of emails—Hillary’s secret shit that proved she was a child molester and all kindsa other awful stuff. A real monster, she was. Everybody’s sayin’ that Putin stole these emails off the Internet to throw the election to Trump.
But Trump’s not buyin’ it. This is when he showed me what a visionary he was. Most people think that to be a visionary you gotta be looking FORWARDS--to new stuff. That’s bullshit. REAL visionaries look BACKWARDS, because everybody older than ten understands that the old days were better. Just ask anybody. We all had work and everybody was happy. We had a system that everybody understood, and it worked. Then we lost our way as a society and everybody got dissatisfied and the eggheads and the computers started running the show. And then you have the lamestream media—Walter Cronkite and those know-it-alls who got us all confused.
Trump was the only politician who got this. The only one who saw that we had to go backwards so we could go forwards. He was way too smart to fall into the same email trap that that old bitch he beat fell into. So he calls a big fuckin’ press conference and says “Screw this computer stuff. It’s only confusing everyone. From now on, if it’s important, it goes by courier.”
Well, nobody believed he would pull it off, but nobody said anything against it, either. Everybody hates their computers. They never work right. And all that money for printer cartridges—what the fuck is with that? So he tapped into that adversity, and suddenly us bike messengers was back in business.
And I mean BACK IN BUSINESS. Within three fuckin’ months there was fourteen new courier companies. Every Federal building, including the goddamn White House, had a courier stand. Bikes lined up for blocks, just like the taxi stand at the fuckin’ airport, waiting for important secret messages in sealed envelopes. We’ve gone international, too. Half those secret documents go overseas, ya know. I flew business class to Moscow six times last year.
And it’s not just us bike messengers who are makin’ out like kings. My brother in law Eduardo works for Office Depot in Jersey and every time I see him, at Christmas or whatever, he’s telling me how the filing cabinets are flyin’ off the showroom floor. And paper—my god!—everything has to be in triplicate or fourplicate or fiveplicate, ya know. Those hanging file folders. Paper clips. Stamps and fuckin’ ink pads. That shit was just flyin’ off the shelf. ‘Course, by then it was all made in China. But if you worked at Office Depot like Eduardo, or you was a government secretary, you was happenin'.
It isn’t all peaches and cream for us couriers, though, I have to admit. Ya hafta wait a long time sometimes for the government folks to get the package ready for ya, and the receiving end is a freakin’ nightmare. You hafta bring back a receipt for every goddam agency. The State Department wants a receipt. The FBI wants a receipt. The NSA wants a receipt. Kellyanne Conway wants a receipt. So you gotta deliver all of them, too. Man, if people thought the government moved slow BEFORE, they’d flip if they saw it NOW. But, hey—it’s job security!
This whole racket has had a few setbacks recently, I have to admit. There was that guy—forget his name—who was stuffing all his top-secret deliveries into his closet and handing in phony delivery receipts. And—this wasn’t at my courier agency, mind you—they figured out a few months back that the Russians had hacked the text messages of a courier dispatcher and were using them to figure out where the secret messages were going and then stealing them the old-fashioned way—by using inside moles to make copies. So the microfiche guys have made a comeback, too!
So bringing back couriers hasn’t solved all the problems in the world, mind you, but with Trump’s backwards vision—I know several folks in the White House now that I’m there so often, and they say he’s NEVER used a computer—the bike courier business is great again, to coin a phrase!
Those folks in the White House tell me that Trump hates cell phones, too. Can’t wait to see how fast and how far he runs backwards on those goddam things. We’ll have pay phones again! Go ahead and laugh. Don’t underestimate this guy.
