Courier Culture

WASHINGTON, D.C.--"Can you sign for this?"

I looked up from where I was sorting faxes, my tie uncomfortably riding up my neck, my feet aching within my boxy, ill-fitting brown shoes. Standing there was a tall man with braids sticking out from under his neon-orange helmet. He wore tight red shorts and his muscles, everywhere, were coated with sweat.

"Uh, sure," I said, and he handed me the package and the pen, the grimy list of deliveries pulled from his waterproof satchel. Thinking as an intern, I knew my signature couldn't possibly be traced if this package was lost, but with typical intern bravado I looked like I had signed many of these before. As I stood near him, the temperature in the office building seemed to rise from its normal level of refrigeration. The room also filled with a rich musty scent of a courier at work.

I pondered this experience for the rest of the slow afternoon as I read faxes, kept an eye on the websites and waited (as all newspaper reporters must) for vital phone calls to be returned. The courier had swaggered in here, out of breath--not much older than me, I figured. The look of him wiping sweat from his brow as he left the office stayed with me.

The visage stayed with me as I walked home, wincing at the pain my shoes were causing, sweating as the long-sleeved collar shirt ran rough on my neck, soaked through. Such is the end of a D.C. intern's day. When commuting from an unpaid workplace to my expensive housing, often the best way to go is on foot, since Metro money can add up to fund dinner later.

In Farragut Square, I heard the couriers before I saw them. It was a boisterous laugh: Five couriers gathered, their bikes resting in the grass, joking about a day well spent. D.C. interns have a culture of their own; as a media person I am somewhat off the intern routine, but I see them enough to describe it well. Interns dress for their congressional offices in the uncomfortable and eternally vague "business attire." Interns put in long days of answering phones and doing research for higher-ups who are accustomed to both dressing well and being able to ask someone to find information on those new-fangled computers for them. Interns may walk home to save a buck, only to blow the money on Coronas in smoky bars full of fellow interns. And interns awake in the morning with another hangover, zip and scrunch themselves into the uncomfortable clothes and begin again.

Though the newspaper side of my summer journey has been a wonderful experience, I must admit that the politics has not. That old adage about laws and sausages seems to hold. When the couriers enter the office, I look longingly at them walking down the hall. They bike away to freedom, with no ties, literal or figurative, to the office. They don't care, frankly, which senator walked down your hallway or called the office, which minute change in policy there is to be tracked. And--this definitely is key--they get paid.

As I walk through the Farragut Square, trudging home, there is a sweaty hand I wish I would shake.

Adam I. Arenson '00-'01, a Crimson executive, is a history and literature concentrator in Lowell House. He is working this summer as an editorial intern and reporter for The Hill.