Before the sun came up on Friday, a woman parked at a stoplight in a minivan stared at me while I carried a 25-pound electric scooter along the side of Eagle Road in my pajamas.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her roll down her window to get a closer look while I carefully placed the scooter on the sidewalk outside of a Meridian subdivision, tilted the handlebars to the left and took a photo with my smartphone. As she drove away, I walked back to my car to retrieve the other three black and lime green vehicles stacked in the back of my SUV so I could arrange them neatly for the day’s e-scooter riders of the Treasure Valley.

No, I have not left the Idaho Press to work for an e-scooter company. Instead, I signed up as an independent contractor with the California-based company Lime (formerly LimeBike) to charge the popular scooters overnight and put them back on the streets for commuters to find the next day. Even though the scooters are only in Meridian right now, they are headed for Boise in mid-October.

People who charge Lime scooters are officially called “Lime Juicers” (get it?) and the company pays roughly $5 per scooter to be collected, charged and placed back in specially marked locations. When I first signed up, I went through a 15-minute digital training course on how to navigate through the app, was quizzed on the basics and given instructions to pick up my initial allotted batch of four chargers to power the scooters.

When I picked up the chargers in an office park off Cole Road, I walked into a barely furnished room with hundreds of waiting scooters and was quickly handed my four chargers by a Lime employee. No one checked my name or information, and I was told that the Lime app on my phone would allow me to begin “harvesting” scooters within a few hours.

The way the system works is scooters low on battery can be picked up any time, but the vast majority of them can’t be collected for charging until after 9 p.m. Eager to try the system out, I looked over the Lime map a little after 8 p.m. and set off to collect my first scooter. I saw one near the center of Meridian that had a low battery and punched the intersection in to my GPS.

When my phone said I arrived, I hopped out of the car excited to grab the device, but then I realized the scooter I was hunting had already been picked up by another enterprising person in the 15 minutes it took me to drive there. Somewhat dejected, I set my sights for another scooter about 10 blocks to the west.

As I pulled up, another SUV was parked on the side of the road with the trunk popped and an older man was loading the scooter into the back. He turned around and saw me with my phone in my hand and said, “Sorry, man! Finders keepers,” with an apologetic shrug.

I quickly realized that the scooter-charging business is less easy money and more Pokemon Go, the popular smartphone game that had gamers of all ages racing each other to capture virtual monsters in public parks and on city streets in the summer of 2016. Except here people are competing for money to pay their bills and not just for fun.

Eventually I found four scooters all parked next to each other on one corner, but I had to wait until 9 p.m. before they were eligible for collection. In order to prevent someone else from taking them, I quickly gathered the devices up and stood guard while I waited for the minutes to tick down until collection time. In the few minutes I stood on the corner I saw at least one car roll by slowly checking for scooters.

When the time came to load them into my car, I was shocked at how heavy and unruly each device is. I could only safely carry one vehicle at a time, and it took some wrangling to get all four piled into my car. Then I drove away with hundreds of dollars worth of scooters feeling like a thief.

I got home, wrestled the scooters out of my car and into the hallway outside of my garage for charging and set my alarm for 5:45 a.m. so I could get up early enough to place them back out on the street and claim my $20. When I woke up, I was greeted by a cheery phone notification telling me my scooters were fully charged and ready for “serving” before the company’s strict deadline of 7 a.m.

Aside from the gawker at the red light, I didn’t see anyone else while I was putting scooters out the same way I had to race others to collect the devices the night before. In the dark of the morning, I quietly set out the scooters, marked the task as completed in the Lime app and got a congratulatory notification informing me of my earnings. I drove with the light flow of traffic headed into Boise and wondered if all of that effort was worth the extra $20 set to hit my bank account in two to three business days.