Poppa's Got a Brand New Bag

Over the weekend, Laura and I built some shelves/bike cubby for my former co-worker, Petra. We went to sleep a little too late and a little too drunk on Friday night, so we drank way too much coffee and headed on over to her place. Laura watched Petra's son, Magnus, who I first met as a lump in Petra's belly a little over a year ago as we got all the lumber at Home Depot. The whole experience was pretty rewarding, I got to say that I've made a set of shelves (nope, never done that before) Laura got to feed a bit of her baby jones (the clock it ticks, softly, but steadily) and Petra gave us her smaller shelf that the bigger one displaced. I was also paid a bit and Petra gave me this old but very new looking Kozmo.com bag that she had had lying around for a while.

I love this thing, it's one of the few surviving artifacts of the dot-com boom.

For those of you who weren't in New York circa 2000, Kozmo was a fantastic failure of a messenger service that allowed you to have everything from ice cream to porn delivered to your apartment at no extra cost. Everyone who worked for them got paid an hourly rate plus tips. They tried to do this very complicated delivery system that never quite worked and because 1. they had no minimums, people would just use Kozmo to order little things that they were too lazy to go out of their dormrooms to get and 2. the people that started it were internet people, not delivery people. At one point, I was going to get hooked up with a job with them, but they went tits-up before I had the chance to apply.

Each of the messengers got these high-quality Chrome bags that were bright Orange and had this Green little guy running across them with "Kozmo" written all over them. The business plan was bad, but bags they bought were quality and you can still see them on messengers backs all over the city.

I actually worked for a summer with this woman, Hannah who designed their little logo and told me great stories of being taken out on company dinners at Nobu and making $80,000 her first year out of art school. She also told me about round after round of layoffs as the cookie crumbled and long, long periods of unemployment afterwards.

I did my Monday Morning deliveries with it this morning and it works pretty good. It doesn't have the patented Timbuk-2 strap release, which can make it a little difficult to take things out of, but it fits around your shoulder and back like a baby sloth clinging to its mama. It also holds a hell of a lot of stuff. It's bright, florescent Orange and when I wear it with my bright yellow helmet, I look like an important piece of text that's been highlighted. This thing is the shit!