Damn the Man, 1st January meeting of 2010

The CCU had a meeting this week, and as promised, here is your DTM from that meeting:
The biker who had this week's Damn the Man complained that he had been pin-balled all week by the dispatcher at his company. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of being pin-balled, it means being dispatched from one end of the bike zone to the other. It can be very frustrating and exhausting to have to work in this way. A good dispatcher will try to give you work in sets, which not only gets the jobs done quicker and more efficiently, but also limits the amount of distance a biker has to ride in order to make money. On the other hand, when you get pin-balled from one corner of the bike zone to the other, you quickly rack-up the miles without making the money, and it also wastes a lot of your time.
Lets look at a couple of examples:
Biker A has a skilled dispatcher who cares about her well-being, wants to make her money, and also wants to get the jobs on the board completed on time. This dispatcher knows that he doesn't necessarily have to dispatch the jobs as soon as they come in, but he can hold on to them for a little while and try to make a set. Biker A gets a set of four runs coming out of three buildings in the loop. All four runs are going to buildings on North Michigan Avenue, around Chicago Ave. It takes biker A about fifteen minutes to pick up all four jobs. She then rides 1.5 miles north to the first drop. The other three drops are near by, so after another twenty minutes she is clean and ready for more work. During this time, she has ridden her bike about 2.5 miles and made $14.00 in about 45 minutes.
Biker B, on the other hand has a dispatcher on the other end of the radio who is dispatching runs one at a time as they come in to whichever biker is next in line for work. Biker B gets a run going from the loop to Streeterville. He drops it and calls in clean. After a few minutes his dispatcher sends him a page for a run going from the Loop to the edge of the bike zone in the West Loop. He rides back into the Loop empty-handed and gets his run going out to Racine street. It takes him about ten minutes to ride out there and drop it, after which he calls in clean again. Wouldn't you know it, but the dispatcher has another run coming out of the loop going to the same place he just dropped. The dispatcher could have held on to the first run for a little while to see if he had anything else to go with it. When the second run came in, he could have dispatched them both at the same time to one biker, gotten them both dropped on time, and helped out his crew a little bit. But he didn't. So after a ten-minute ride back into the loop, and another five minutes picking up his third package, biker B is on his way back out to the west Loop. He cleans up fifteen minutes later and calls in for more work. He gets one more run coming from the Merchandise Mart going down to Printers Row in the South Loop. It takes biker B about 25 minutes to pick up and make the drop. Biker B is getting frustrated and a little bit tired by this point. He has completed four runs in just under two hours, ridden just over ten miles, and made about $13.00. In order to complete four runs, biker B has ridden four times the distance that biker A has and worked twice as long. Biker B is making less than minimum wage at this point, and is working very hard.
Biker B has realized that this the kind of situation you find yourself in when you don't have any control over your workplace, so he was sure to make it to the next CCU meeting.