Andrew Weiner is a courier in Boston.

Best begin with signatures, since I collect them professionally. Not for their resale value, either. Signatures feed each stream of speculative, tangible, and social capital that courses through the city. Every merger and acquisition, every hiring, firing, and discreetly retiring will sooner or later pass across the inked and calloused hand of a courier. Attribute it to tradition, superstition, or the lack of hack-proof encryption technology: Signatures are still the way business gets done. Any deal that begins with a handshake ends inside the deformed, bestickered aluminum box that holds a courier's delivery manifest.

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Some sign with a wink, others with a dismissive nod, too few with a simple "Thanks," all too many with the thousand-year stare of the terminally bored. By the end of the day, the manifest's numbered boxes contain patient printing, hasty initials, the occasional elaborate gestures of flourish and filigree. My own signature, reproduced above in all its slovenliness, is slack-assed enough to inspire a Fray-ful of jeremiads about the dreadful decline of penmanship standards. Occam's Razor, not to mention a parade of well-intentioned schoolteachers, suggests that I'm simply careless. Fair enough, although I sometimes like to flatter myself into believing that my chicken-scratched cuneiform conveys a certain shabby chic or at least serves to jam the radar of anyone who might presume to judge from appearances. But you don't need a handwriting analyst to know that it's a courier's signature—it doesn't care what impression it leaves as it jets off elsewhere.

Not that I haven't had plenty of time to improve it, since one of my chief, er, responsibilities is to be a stand-in. I spend someone else's time for them wherever they're too busy to go: the RMV (good for 40 to 60 minutes wait at $18 hourly), the deli, the registries of birth and death (never less than a half-hour at City Hall), the cell phone service, the drycleaner's, the travel agent's, the locksmith's, even the haberdasher's (I once picked up collar stays for a partner's shirt from a clothier's across the street from our client [with the wait, the charge came to $22]).

What a courier calls work, most anyone else would call survival instinct. A lot is purely neural: The conditioned ability to correct skids, air over an unexpected pothole, see a car door open a good second before it actually does. Everyone I know has a secret weapon. Mooks use heavy artillery like pocket locks or their fists, but the deft minority relies on the smart bomb, an obscure but bilious kiss-off—Flipperbaby! and Shut yer doughnut hole! come to mind.

Given a workplace where the only constant is change and the other only constant is serial jackassery, couriers have to either adapt or develop some kind of reptilian exoskeleton. It also helps to have a high boredom threshold. Riders negotiate this problem according to their style: Some drink early and often, others hone their video golf game, or bicker, doze, read the classics, mack. I serve out my time by playing tourist in my own city, shooting photos, sketching, wandering, trying either to get lost or encounter the uncanny or else take in some unexpected street theater.

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