Being a delivery guy while Austin goes boom!

Well, March has been an explosive month in the Central Texas courier business. We had a serial bomber on the loose! It made me miss delivering flowers. At least when I brought floral arrangements, no one expected them to explode in their face. The recent terrorizing of the Austin area has had everyone on edge. When I delivered flowers people smiled when they saw me approach. Lately, when approaching someone with a delivery package, their body language began to exhibit tension and scream "run to the hills!" People would glance at me sideways and contort their faces walking briskly in the other direction. Normally a delivery guy shares the same anonymity as the leaf blower guy. Not March 2018 in Austin.

I never felt so conspicuous carrying brown boxes. I felt awkward for the first time doing this work. Since we area small family run business priding ourselves on personalized service I wanted to hug everyone of our clients in the receiving departments to assure them I was benign. Thankfully the situation is over, and I am now pondering a new tagline "Spectrum Delivery, our packages don't blow up." Too soon?

Spectrum Delivery is based in Round Rock. Just a few miles down the road from where the confessed bomber detonated himself into oblivion alongside Interstate 35. Being in the courier service I can say I-35 has that effect on a lot of us. Next time you need something brought to you or you want to send a package out. Give us a shout. You can relax knowing we come with the desire to hug and you can take the bomb squad off of speed dial. I am grateful for the men and women in law enforcement that worked so hard to apprehend this public menace. We all should be. Now it is back to being the anonymous spectrum delivery guy. I hope my next blog is still a blast, but hopefully not about the explosive kind.

Mopac is done and so is my wallet

After 4 years of delays and setbacks the latest attempt to lesson the traffic congestion in Austin has been opened...and so have the wallets. In the first week alone drivers paid upwards of eight dollars to use a new lane. The lane that bills you on a sliding scale so you don't know how much you are paying until the bill comes. No thanks. Then there is the problem of someone in front of you going slow. Then you are stuck paying a bill and not even gaining the benefit of gong faster than the free lanes next to you. No thanks again.

When the local traffic helicopter reporter says it's saving you only 2 minutes on your journey a hearty NO THANKS I say! Yet, many people are using the lane? I can only assume money is not something these 2 minute fancies are concerned with. I am tickled these folks are using the lane because it is actually making the free lanes less congested. Kind of like if they added a new lane on Mopac, and they did!! It didn't need to be a toll. Of course, we all know this. The powers that be could have just added a new lane and we would see what are seeing now. Get ready Austin, I-35 is next on the agenda. I'm willing to bet we will get some new lanes that will cost us considerably and wreck downtown even more. People will use them no matter the cost too. I hear many of the plans involve a tunnel. This ought to be interesting. I can see drivers being stuck behind a wreck in a lane underground not going anywhere with the meter running, thinking I should have taken Mopac. If you happen to be a client of Spectrum Delivery and Distribution rest assured. If the order is a rush and 2 minutes will make the difference, I bite the bullet and shell out the toll...reluctantly.

Barton Springs High Rise Water Feature

I've lived in Austin 39 years. The entirety of this time Austin has been in boom town mode. Many of my various occupations have involved me being some kind of Austin delivery guy. Whether I was driving for Locally famous ice cream shops, a flower shop in Westlake or even now operating an Austin Delivery/Courier Service ...Spectrum Delivery, I have experienced the ever changing atmosphere and remain astonished. I kind of always expected this to slow down at some point, but it has not. All new roads seem to lead to tolls nowadays and they are coming into town as frequently as the high rise condo's downtown or outdoor mall residences. The current toll under construction on Mopac will even feature a sliding scale toll fee based on the demand & congestion at the time. Even the tolls are in flux. In the eighties if someone told me my old neighborhood near Burnet/Kramer would feature a "second downtown" I would have laughed in their face. Yet, here is the Domain with it's Rock Rose strip and budding nightlife scene.

Where are we headed? I foresee an elderly grandparent pointing to Barton Springs from behind glass showing his grandchild the historical landmark. Saying "Seee... there Honey, thats where the hippies would swim". They are standing on the first retail floor built over the Springs. Barton Springs has now become a water feature on the first floor of a building that rises high to the sweet spot in the sky holding a view of Town Lake( I still cannot call it Lady Bird Lake). Maybe there is a marker commemorating the famed swimming hole with old grainy photos of the past citizens at play and the Grandparent smiles muttering something about the hippies. Things change, I get it. I ponder this while driving a golf ball off of the roof of the top grossing bar in N.Austin. I needed gas last Thursday and things like a blog or social media nearly caused me to stall out and left stranded. There was a flash mob gas panic! That's a blog for another time.

It is my desire to fill this blog with some humorous and useful information pertaining to the logistics of getting around locally. Tiny tips like don't get on 183 from Cedar Park to Duval during A.M. rush hour or a tractor trailer filled with pork has jackknifed on I-35 , caught fire and downtown now smells like bacon. I actually believe this happened once. Perhaps I can even entice one to call Spectrum Delivery Service, a locally owned Austin, courier, delivery service to save you time or money. In the meantime our drivers are out there in the milieu keeping an eye and ear on the road.