Authors Note: I have been informed by my wife that the following is “kind of bitter” and I might want to “rethink the tone” of the story. After careful consideration I have decided that it is not nearly bitter enough. In fact, I’m half tempted to replace the periods with the word “fuckers.” I don’t really feel bitter about this time in my life except that people always assumed that I was stupid because I was a delivery driver. That, and certain people with money think that makes them “smart” “special” or some shit. Nope, just makes you rich. So here we go, bitterness and all…
Avoid the Noid
I graduated from college in the spring of 1991 at a time of high unemployment. When I chose Physics as my major I had thought the biggest problem facing me after graduation would be whether or not I would find myself working for a defense contractor – which I didn’t really want to do. Well, when I graduated, defense contractors were laying people off. We’d “won” the cold war and our reckless arms race slowed down. As happy as I was that that was happening, I was also dead broke. After getting zero responses on hundreds of resumes, I started setting my sights lower and lower. After getting rejected by 84 Lumber for a job because I was “overqualified” I even started lying about my education on applications. Fuck my college education – if it was going to keep me from working in a goddamned lumberyard I was going to treat it like so many other events in my life. Deny it ever fucking happened.
This is how I ended up with a job delivering
pizzas. The only acknowledgement I gave
to my five years of study on the application was to jokingly list “Non-linear
Vibronic Laser Spectroscopy” under the “Other Interests” section. My guidance counselor in high school told me
I should always put something there to “demonstrate character.” Well that should have done it. Oddly, the manager of the pizza place caught
it and asked what it was. I basically
said “We froze shit to like 350 degrees below zero and shot a laser at it to
see what happened.” I’m pretty sure his
response was, “Cooooool” (he was high… they were ALL high). Anyway, he checked me for a pulse and gave
me a job.
One of the first lessons I learned about pizza
delivery is that the delivery orders do not go out the door in the order in
which they are received or even the order in which they become available – the
orders go out the door based on how good the people who placed the order tip
the driver. Keep that in mind next time
you get a delivery. Particularly a late
one. Anyway, I resolved not to succumb
to such greed and to deliver the food to people who ordered first as quickly as
possible. This proves just how fucking
stupid I am. It is also how I ended up
continually delivering to the absolute worst customer ever.
Now, any pizza place has a delivery area that
is defined by reasonable driving distances and times. Well most of them. Ours
extended a little past what was reasonable because of the affluence of a
particular neighborhood. This is
particularly bad because delivering to an affluent neighborhood is hell for a
delivery person. Rich people do not
tip, are intolerable, and will demand their food for free if it’s “late.” How big a tip do you get on a free meal? You figure it out.
Anyway, back to the Worst Customer Ever
(WCE). I first became acquainted with
WCE because I noticed that their order had been sitting waiting to go out for
about twenty minutes. When I saw the
address I cringed because it was so far away and I wouldn’t be able to take
multiple orders with me. Taking four or
five orders at a time was key to making money, taking this order was the
antidote to making money. But I was
young and idealistic (stupid), so I took it.
When I finally arrived at the house I was stunned. It had a long horseshoe-shaped cobblestone
driveway and the house looked like it must have been worth millions. Hell, I could see a detached four-car
garage, a basketball court, a swimming pool and a house by the pool. Not a pool house, mind you, a fucking
house. I was delivering a pizza to
house that had, as a feature, another house.
Anyway, WCE comes to the door to collect the
order and springs a coupon on me. I
fucking hate that. Everything is
already rung-up in the register and, in essence, I have purchased the food on
my own tab to be repaid when I return with the customer’s money. Now everything needs to be recalculated and
I have to get a managers approval for the coupon or pay the $1.25 or
whatever. Dicks. So anyway, they get the food for 9.75. They hand me a 10-dollar bill, I give them a
quarter and we’re done. That’s right,
no fucking tip at all. I’m now
officially losing money on the delivery.
Would these assholes do this in a restaurant? They’d probably at least drop a buck or two and the fucking
waiter only had to go from the kitchen to the table. I drove ten fucking miles IN MY OWN CAR to your fucking mansion
and I’m not even worth a quarter?!?
Fuck you!
This scenario repeated itself over and
over. They would often make me wait for
long periods of time while they found money or a checkbook or the babysitter –
it was horrible. I began to resent them
but couldn’t bring myself to not deliver their food. However, that didn’t mean I had to do a good job of it. It’s worth mentioning here that I never once
did anything nasty to anybody’s food – not ever at any job. Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t do
anything at all, just nothing unhealthy.
I started with how I cut their pizza.
Pizzas are typically cut into eight equal pieces by dividing the pizza
into half, then quarters, then eighths with the pieces all being equal and
meeting in the center. Well not for
these assholes, not anymore. Now it was
eight pieces but the “center” moved about eight inches in a random direction
yielding a wide diversity in slice sizes.
A WIDE diversity – like a two inch slice next to a ten inch slice. Fuck you, you won’t know until you open the
box later. Oh, and good luck with that
two liter bottle of soda that I’ve been shaking during the twenty minute drive
to your house. And do you know the best
part of answering the phone at a pizza place?
Getting a complaint call about something you did. “Oh that’s horrible Mrs. Jones, we’ll be
sure to discipline the driver.”
Fuckers.
The delivery area I worked in was quite
diverse. This was due, in part, to the
presence of the mushroom industry which attracted a large number of migrant
workers. The sad fact was that a
delivery made to a trailer packed with migrant workers would yield a tip of two
to three dollars while one made to a 5,000 square foot McMansion might yield a
dollar or less. This is how the rich
got or stayed rich I guess. Never be
generous, only be selfish. This may
seem a harsh judgment of the rich but it is based on experience.
Here is a case in point. There was a private school in the delivery
area of the place I worked where all of the rich and elite folks sent their
kids to learn to be obnoxious fucking assholes such as themselves. I worked the lunch shifts most days so I was
the only driver on duty the day this school decided to have a “pizza party
fund-raiser.” The concept was that they
would buy a bunch of pizzas from our shop and sell them to the students at a
dollar a slice. Now, this concept doesn’t
work too well if you consider that we were selling slices at $1.25 in our own
shop. So, they asked for a discount if
they ordered in “bulk” and they got it.
Pizzas that we sold at about $8 each went to these guys at $4 each. They were making more on the pizzas at their
fundraiser than we were at the shop.
Anyway, those motherfuckers ordered 60 fucking
large cheese pizzas. At lunch
time. During my shift. Did I mention they are motherfuckers. Think about this. One customer, 60 pizzas.
How does that work? What about
the other ten or more customers ordering food?
And here’s another thing: Have
you ever put a pizza in your car? Sure
you have. Have you ever put two in your
car – probably? Three? Maybe.
Twenty? No fucking way. Sixty?
Not in your whole fucking lifetime friend. All at once? Not even
fucking possible. My car was NOT
FUCKING BIG ENOUGH TO HOLD THE ORDER.
After the first thirty or so came out, I boxed ‘em up and loaded my
hatchback to capacity. Having more than
a few pizzas in the car was usually a problem for me as the heat and steam
could fog the windows. Having thirty
was like a driving a fucking sauna. I
couldn’t keep the windows clear and had trouble making it to the school. I was not in a good mood when I arrived.
Did I mention that these people were
motherfuckers? When I got there they
didn’t have anyone waiting to receive the pizzas. Oh no. Some guy just said
“Set everything up in there,” and pointed at a cafeteria. What the fuck, did you think you called a
caterer? So I take the pizzas into the
cafeteria – literally fighting a sea of spoiled rich motherfuckers-to-be
(motherfucking pupae). Of course, I’m
only half way done. The other pizzas
are spitting our of the oven back at the shop and I return to get them. Once again I fill my car to capacity with
pizzas and return to the motherfucker hatchery. Total Fucking Chaos. Kids
running everywhere buying slices of shitty cheese pizza for $1 like it was
fucking crack cocaine. I swear to god
I’m lucky I lived. I dropped off the
remaining pizzas and packed up to leave.
All that remained was the bill.
The bill. Did I mention that
these people were motherfuckers? Well
it might come up again.
They got their pizzas for $4 each and each one
had eight slices that they sold at $1 each.
Do the math. That’s $480 gross
for them and they owe me $240. That’s
not fucking bad considering their effort was comprised of making a phone
call. So, I’m ready to collect. There were only two people working at the
shop – me and the manager – and this little enterprise had irrevocably fucked
up our lunch. I had spent an hour on a
single delivery and knew the rest of the lunch deliveries would be late and I
wouldn’t get much in the way of tips. I
just wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible. Nope.
No fucking way. I asked for the
money and I got a response that absolutely floored me. “We need to sell a few more pizzas before we
can pay you.” What the
fuck?!?!?!?!? Are you kidding????
That’s right these MOTHERFUCKERS didn’t have
the money up front. They actually
“floated” sixty pizzas to make themselves $240. And I’m not lying when I say it costs more than that a week to
send your snot-nosed motherfucker want-to-be to this shit-hole elitist private
school. So now they make me wait until
they’ve sold at least half of the pizza and then they pay me. I shouldn’t have been surprised by what
happened next, I really shouldn’t have.
It’s just that it’s so wrong that it should never have happened so I
didn’t see it coming. Did I mention
that they were selling the slices for $1?
Did I mention that they didn’t have the money up front? Right.
So how did they pay the $240 bill?
With two HUNDRED and FORTY fucking one-dollar bills. Better count it a couple of times, huh? And please note – they paid the bill with
240 one-dollar bills. Not 250 or even
245. Nope. They made me make two trips.
They made me setup their pizza party.
They made me wait while the collected enough money to pay me. They paid me in ones. They stiffed me on the tip. Every other delivery that lunch hour was
late because of them and I didn’t get a fucking tip from anyone. In fact, I got a fucking load of bullshit
from most of the customers over being late.
How can anyone be so fucking elitist and nasty? Well I’m not sure but if you want to know,
you could always ask the fine assholes at SANFORD SCHOOL IN HOCKESSIN DELAWARE.
I’m not bitter.
Anyway, my manager asked me how good a tip I
got from them and I told him the story.
He popped open the register, took out a twenty and handed it to me. He wrote a note to explain the $20 and put
it in the register. He wrote another
explaining that SANFORD SCHOOL IN HOCKESSIN DELAWARE should never get such a
discount again and put it on bulletin board where we put the list of all of the
people “we don’t deliver to / give refunds to / accept checks from”
I used to get stuck delivering food to the NVF
paper plant in Yorklyn, DE. It’s not as
inconvenient to get to as it sounds, but I could never find the people who
ordered the food. When someone ordered
from NVF, I had to go to the guard shack, sign in, and get dispatched to the
general area of the plant where the guy ordering was working. This was usually fairly time-consuming and
more than a little frustrating.
One day an order came in way before my shift started. The order came it at like 10:15am and I
started at 11:00. I was working two
jobs at the time – I did tutoring in the morning, pizza at lunch, tutoring in
the evening, and/or pizza in the evening (again). I did my best to get to the job on time but it didn’t always work. I couldn’t just get up in the middle of a
math lesson and deliver a pizza and I couldn’t go and give a math lesson while
delivering a pizza. So, on this day, I
got to work about 11:15 – an hour after the order. I took it directly there and tracked down the guy who ordered the
food. He was pissed.
Let me just say this. Fuck him.
No really, fuck him.
I got there at 11:30 which, I admit, was more
than hour after the order was placed.
However, it was only 30 minutes after opening and COMPLETELY in line
with our delivery policy. No good for
him. He wasn’t interested in when we
opened and wasn’t moved by the fact they he ordered 45 minutes before my shift even
started. He seemingly forgot my manager
telling him that deliveries didn’t start until 11:00am. Not
only that, this asshole yelled in my face that he “didn’t want the fucking
cheese-steak now, it’s too late.” Too
late for a steak? No fucking way. Is it too late for the fries too? Good.
I’m fucking hungry. I walked
back to my car with his lunch, I got in, started the car, reached into the
delivery bag, and started eating his fucking lunch right in front of him.
This was probably not the best way to handle
the situation. If I had the whole thing
to do over again, I never would have sat there eating his lunch in front of
him. Really, when you think about, all
that food has a lot of fat in it and I have high cholesterol and blood pressure.
What I should have done was to place
his lunch underneath one of the wheels of my car and peel out right the fuck on
top of it. That would have rocked. Well, hindsight is 20-20, I guess you just have
to go with your gut!