DISPATCH MESSENGER SERVICES
CIRCA 1991 NEW ZEALAND

A report on attitudes and actions that laid the way for global expansion.
By yours truly, Victor the Hutmaster.

I got hired by the proto-DMS in Wellington, New Zealand in 1991, a "lucky break" I was repeatedly told, since it normally took several weeks to get a job with them. But my talent, sucking up and timing let me walk into their prestigious halls, aka a somewhat cramped by acceptable office/crew space with a backroom devoted to dispatching and evolution of what was touted to be the "new wave" in courier and delivery firm technology- super duper software able to make a company's operations more rational, reliable, and competitive. What they didn't say is that the software came with a set of assumptions that deemed human contentment as secondary to economic efficiency.

I was assigned a pink shirt and taken on the Pixie Post rounds by Mark, an outgoing and slightly oddball guy a little older than myself, who was moving on from the training ground of the mail rounds to actual open call duty working for Office Express, the main of the three companies that were simultaneously owned and operated (and co-dispatched and co-housed) by DMS. Open call, for those of you unfamiliar with the sheer joy of it, is when any and all messengers are allowed to pick up any and all jobs on the board, which are called out serially as they come in, with the closest messenger who calls for the job getting the pick up. The software being used allowed the company to track which rider picked up each job, and which rider dropped the job off, allowing for fluid and fair handing off of jobs. It also meant that if you happened to be outside of, say, the New Zealand Reserve Bank, as I was one day, and, say, twenty-five jobs get called for pick-up, you get to run in and get credit for all those pick-ups, then run outside to a gaggle of compadres who have by that time arrived and divvy up the loot into directions and runs as you see fit.

I spent a week or so mucking around the post routes, picking up and delivering mail with a huge set of keys and always some dumb thing messing up, as annoying and low paid as most route messenger work is. Pixie Post was a holding tank to get you familiar with DMS operations, and then the next hire would take your place and you would don the yellow shirt of Office Express, or, if you were a woman, perhaps the green shirt of XX, the all-women company. Now, hearing the story of the acquisition of that company was the first thing that gave me the willies about how much of a capitalist dungeon I had walked into.

XX was an independent company, perhaps a collective although I'm not sure, but all women and proud of it. They had set up their own client base and competed genially with other courier companies, of which there were very few, at least bicycle-based courier companies. Tom Finley had had Office Express as more or less two-man operation for some time when he met Greg WWW at the Lake Taupo Century, and Greg's great management ideas met with Tom's malaise and soon Office Express was taken over to become the great example of what total efficiency could do to a company. As part of this, the owners of XX were approached to sell out. Perhaps deciding that they preferred a steady living to a quick bit of cash, perhaps that they just plain liked doing what they did, the owners repeatedly refused to sell. So DMS, easily able to find out the location of clients in a town as a small as Wellington, offered free courier services to all XX clients, eventually starving the XX owners into submission. DMS chose to preserve a facade of competition, acting as if Office Express and XX were still separately owned, although clients quickly conned on if they noticed the occasional slip-ups where one company would pick up for another. We were given evasive answers to pander in response, forcing the riders to lie on a regular basis about something as basic as the structure of the company they worked for and creating an atmosphere of deceit and duplicity.

DMS sent out little monthly thank-you gifts to all their clients, slightly different for the two "different" companies, and had all these nice smug-sounding reasons for everything they were doing, explaining each action they took in terms of how it related to the greater company good and the overall rational, precise business plan aimed at complete expansion of DMS activities to a global level, focusing on the selling of their computer technology to as many companies as possible, ideally causing all messenger companies who did not rely upon their system to become de facto obsolete, extinct, and easy meat.

To this end they had a crack team of committed people who were living on a very limited yearly stipend (I believe $10,000 NZ, about $6,000 US at the time) and thinking about how greatly the value of the stake and stock they held in the company would increase when the company went public sometime in the glorious future. I hope they sold out when the stock hit $30, because now it's back down to ten.

Anyway, they had what were for the time cutting edge Macs with huge monitors, and some very devoted staff, some hard riders, a lot of students, and a few oddballs. There was definitely a buzz in the company, and they did things like take everybody up to Lake Taupo to race and made attempts at camaraderie, but it was ultimately the capitalist rush of acquisition, expansion, and domination which ruled the company. They took sleepy New Zealand by storm, and suddenly had thirty or forty riders working for them. Using the open call system they were able to guarantee five minute pickups (Wellington is also fairly small and geographically centralized) and more or less kick other companies around, and for a time it was gravy and good times as the pre-Christmas rush coincided with the pre-Summer rush to create a huge wave of volume which we struggled to match. Being a goof-off, I liked the job but had a penchant for riding crappy step-through bikes and getting distracted, so I was devastated but not terribly surprised when I was suddenly fired without warning on Dec. 23rd, 1991. What ripped me though, was all the other people they let go. Mark, who had just gotten a little more together and had his hopes up for the future. Some dispatcher who worked there constantly and slaved for them more than they could ever pay him for. Students who were being dumped into a job market recently saturated with other summer vacationing students. It was all handled as if it were something that was unpleasant but unspeakable by DMS staff, and suddenly the "nice folks around the office" became very hard to talk to as I went through the motions of my last day.

I went down the road and got myself a nice $12 an hour job in a café I'd been lobbying for six months. About a week later one of the DMS bosses came in. She wasn't happy to see me but she needed her coffee. I slowly knocked the used espresso grounds out and readied the next load. She was trying not to converse or look at me. I readied the styrofoam cups and started heating the milk. Still we both tried not to deal with each other. After an infinity, she walked off with her precious cargo in a brown paper bag, never noticing that I'd spat in her cappuccino.