Can I be Nearly as Interesting as Slang?

[Elspode]

The Pizza Chronicles, or "Why You Should be More Frugal in Your Next Life"
(inspired by "The Shitjob Chronicles" by Slang)

An imperative has been looming over me like a menacing cloud for a few months now. The ravenous wolves of increasing living expenses, decreased income, kids in the hospital and an affinity for indoor living and hot meals have managed to back me into a corner. They now stand growling and salivating mere inches from my quivering face. We need more money, and we need it RFN.

I had been talking about taking a second job delivering pizza for some time, but the fact that I have a pretty busy life even without the burden of added employment had been keeping from actually engaging such a job. When it finally became undeniable that the proverbial wolves were indeed actually standing at the door, waving paws full of envelopes stamped "overdue", I
swallowed my pride and headed out to the Papa John's Pizza where our family friend Robert has held a "when I need pocket money" sort of job as a delivery guy for a few years now. As he had predicted, they were pretty much willing to hire anyone with an unencumbered driver's license. Apparently, there is something of a high turnover rate, and a constant supply of warm
bodies and warmer vehicles is always needed. Whoda thunk it?

It felt pretty weird sitting there, filling out the requisite application paperwork and the reams of disclaimers, arbitration agreements, MVR Report approvals...you know - the same stuff that I have other people fill out at my real job? I gave the mound of paper to the 30ish blonde manager lady, whom we will call Stacey (because that is her name), and was told I'd be contacted in a few days, once the MVR came back.

As luck would have it, I didn't hear from anyone for a week, and so I took it upon myself to call back last Friday. Surprise! My MVR had just come back that very day! All looked good, and I was asked when I'd like to report. Nice to have a choice. Since I had major things going on over the weekend, I decided that Monday was as good a starting day as any.

I left my real job at 5:00, and made the 40 minute drive to PJ's in Lee's Summit, MO. I even had time to stop on the way and scarf a couple of greasy Quik Trip tacquitos and a Diet Coke on the way. I called it "dinner" (catchy, huh?). I reported to Stacey who was ensconsced in her managerial "office" (I have a closet bigger than her office, and my closet is much better organized). Flour dust covered everything within, including the hefty knit Papa John's embroidered uniform shirt she dug out from the floor under her desk (counter, actually).

"I'm going to have to call Raleigh to get you a hat...and a nametag. I don't have any nametags," she told me.

"Hat? Eewww...I'm not a real hat person," I replied. She laughed, and made me sign another pile of paperwork. Then, my training began.

Ten minutes later, my training was unceremoniously ended when I was handed my first order and given an unreadable 99th-generation photocopy of a map to guide me to the customer's house. Oh, my. I walked out into the dark, drizzly night and headed out on my first delivery, a two-location job.

Lee's Summit, Missouri is one of the largest cities in the nation in terms of physical boundaries. After experiencing phenomenal growth through the 90's and into the New Millenium, the formerly sleepy Midwestern farm town (home to the infamous Younger brothers of Wild West fame) is a hodgepodge of retail, new housing, old housing and vacant ex-farmland, all swirled together in a Daliesque, suburban hallucinogenic fashion. First note to self: get a better map. The cutup streets quickly became a major challenge. Fifth street runs for five of the necessary seven blocks from where I turned onto it, but abruptly ends in a cul-de-sac at 2000...I needed to get to 2200. Shit. The spitting, misty rain seems to consume the available light from street lights and porch lights, making house numbers impossible to see. Second note to self: either get a 1,000,000 candlepower rechargable floodlight, or a nightvision scope.

Amazingly, I found all my deliveries last night. Six out of the seven were late; two egregiously so. There is very little margin for error. You essentially have 10 usable minutes from the time you walk out the door to get a pizza to the customer within the targeted 35 minutes (pizzas take about 18 minutes from order to completion, bagging, adding extras and getting your directions more or less straight takes about five to seven), so if you go at all astray, you are going to be late. Apparently it is a fairly common thing as PJ's is now sending out recordkeeping sheets for drivers to have the customer sign, showing when their order was placed, and when it was actually delivered. I lost mine in the dark and the rain, and had to forge it at the end of the night. And so it goes...

Part of me enjoyed the delivery thing. Driving around, listening to the radio, playing hide and go seek with buildings and streets. It was a bit like being a detective, only with the aroma of pizza wafting around you. Maybe like being an Italian detective, I guess.

Next - The bad part of the job...

[flippant]

Watch out for secret shoppers! PJ's is notorious for employee checks....Did you know people are actually paid to buy a pizza?
Ha ha! Do you look cute in that hat?

[Cyber Wolf]

Oh wow, keep writing these! The way you write, I could read these all day!

Ever deliver phone books, Patrick? Your epistle reminds me of that particular job that I have under taken in the past and probably will again this year. Ahhh, phone book delivery in the Colorado snow in December and January. Nothing to compare with it!

It's a shit, temporary job and they hire ANYONE (read me!) who shows up with a vehicle that runs and a driver's licence and insurance or reasonable forgeries there-of. Routes pay a flat fee. Your gas, oil, and vehicle wear and tear (which is considerable) all come out of that before you even begin to get a distant glimpse of a profit. You get your route sheets which if you are lucky may include a teensy indecipherable map of your delivery area. Then you go out to the loading dock where a surly crew flings 30 pound packs of phone books into your car until the suspension shreiks in protest. Then it's off into the snow to attempt delivery on icey mountain roads. If you're lucky, by time your heavily burdened vehicle has made it 5 miles from the delivery station a winter blizzard will have set in. The packs of phone books must be broken open, filled with 4 or 5 advertizing inserts and then each nicely placed in its own plastic bag to protect the book from the elements. Unless you are fortunate enough to have a heated garage (and, by definition, anyone desperate enough to deliver phone books does NOT have a heated garage); you must stand out in the elements doing this task with icey hands (tip: use gloves with the finger tips cut off). Normally one route consists of roughly 300 books. By time you have finished preparing your books for delivery, you will have lost all feeling in both your hands and feet.

At this point, winter storm warnings will have been duely issued, schools closed, and a drivers' advisory will be heard on your car radio telling everyone to stay home. This is your signal to set out for the foothills or out on the plains and start throwing books (not recommended by the friendly people back in the distribution center, but they're not driving through 3 foot snow drifts with a rabid pack of farm dogs chasing them and the clutch on their vehicle giving out). One year I got a route that I thought would be in my own neighborhood, but I had transposed the zip code numbers and the thing turned out to cover the eastern half of Colorado instead. I worked it out, and I figured the thing encompassed 300 hundred square miles for a lousey flat rate of 100 bucks.

I've done things like forget to deliver the other side of the streets on half my routes and then be forced to go back when the error was discovered, mistakenly delivering 500 books to a gated community that actually wasn't on my route, and forced the station manager to wait 3 hours on me because I was the last delivery person to finish up my route - no wait, he had to come in the next day, come to think of it - just for me.

If it was a regular job I'd be fired in a heart beat, but since they're used to the motley collection of derelicts and tramps who show up each year, they hire me back and don't remember about me until too late. I can't wait for this year's coming adventures with Qwest delivery. And my advance apologies to all cellar members who live in Colorado Springs.

[Elspode]

I guess it is a sign of advancing age that I cannot, at this moment, tell you the names of more than one of the five people I worked with last night. Perhaps it is more that I felt so incredbily out of place that I am blocking the details at the subconscious level; some sort of middle-aged guy autonomic self-defense mechanism is chugging away, keeping me from running screaming into the streets over the realization that, at one point, the ages of two of the people with whom I was working, added together, would not have equalled my own age.

In truth, I was mostly ignored by most of the other pizzaoids. I suppose that it must be amusing to have some old guy, a sweaty, long-haired, overweight version of your stepdad, knowing nothing about The Pizza Biz and waiting for you, the edgy, mulitply pierced and tattooed youth, to tell him what to do. Ah, well...the day can't be a complete loss as long as I've provided someone with entertainment. However, due to this rather impersonal juxtaposition of age vs. authority, I really only got to talk at length with one individual, whom we shall call Merle (again, because it is actually his name).

Merle is somewhere within shouting distance of 30, although from which side of it we'd be shouting I do not know. Merle is an almost-tall, rather slender, terribly frantic-looking fellow. Most people would likely feel fairly safe with awarding him the sobriquet of "nerd". Nothing we talked about during the course of the evening would have dissuaded me from handing him that particular tag, anyway.

I'm not certain how we got on the subject, except that, in retrospect, Merle probably tells *everyone* about his bipolar, depressive, psychotic bitch of an ex-wife and the associated trials and tribulations of being a single father. It is even possible that he regales anyone who will listen with the fact that he was the manager of a large mattress store in Texas before his wife's whoring and lack of domestic hygiene led to the demise of their tenuous marital relationship. Passersby on the street have probably heard tell of how even his parents, who revere the institution of marriage above all earthly things, told him that he really should divorce that crazy girl and embark on the adventure of single parenthood. Those who are so presented with the tawdry tales of a young marriage tumbling inexorably toward ruin might sense, as I did, a certain wistfulness in his manner; a slight peek behind a mask of righteousness and outrage that reveals the worried, rejected face of a guy who fears that he may never get laid again if he can't reconcile with the woman who screwed around on him, then ran away to Florida with her boyfriend.

As I listened to Merle talk, we folded up razor-edged cardboard stampings into the various sizes of boxes destined to hold the bounty of PJ's oven. The time passed pretty quickly, marked out only by Merle's incessant, obsessive, outraged rambling, and the occasional profanity uttered by me as I sustained multiple cardboard cuts on my fingers. Merle's work ethic was much the same as his verbal self-presentation...frantic fleeting from one task to another before punching out on the computer and dashing out the door to his next delivery (Note to self - try to work the next Merle conversation around to the subject of the wonderful psychoactive drugs that are presently available to treat OC and other hyperactive disorders). I basked in the peace and quiet of his absence for awhile, and tried to get a handle on my other co-workers.

Stacey, as I mentioned before, is the store manager, but she left for the day while I was out on my first delivery run. The guy left in charge, who we shall call "Captain" (not because it is his name, but because that's what it says on the name tag stuck to his hat), gave me a couple of other pointers, and generally oversaw what I did from an omniscient and safe distance. We passed a few niceties over the course of the evening ("So, have you ever had a driving job before?" - actually, I got asked that question three different times by three different people...I can't imagine what relevance it had, though. Do more experienced pizza delivery guys impress those with less experience?), but mostly, the gulf of age between us was too vast to bridge without benefit of beers or perhaps a CD collection to compare. Captain did ask me later on if I was hungry, and I replied, "That depends on what you're going to say next, I guess." I didn't know if there was free pizza in the offing, or if he was going somewhere else with the question. It turned out that they were getting up a run to Planet Sub next door, and he was just checking to see if I wanted in on that. I didn't, but at least there was that much of an attempt to reach out and be considerate of the new guy.

There were two other drivers working beside Merle and myself. One was pretty intent on what he was doing, and he got the lion's share of the deliveries. He also left the earliest. I assume he is the top dog delivery guy, by dint of his "get-it-done" attitude. We didn't pass a word between us. Merle, blessedly, left for the night around 9:30 to go get his kids from his folks' house, and to take them home and put them to bed (I could give you more details, because he gave them to me, but really...why?). His departure came on the heels of a long and animated telephone conversation of which I could only hear one side. However, the side I could hear sounded very much like what I had heard from him while we folded boxes, so I assume the person on the other end was saying very little anyway. I mean, I had done so, mostly due to a lack of space into which insinuate comment.

As the evening wore on, I had more interaction with the youngest member of the driver corps. I'm not going to name him yet because, well, there was nothing particularly notable about him, and so I think I'll just relate the information once I actually absorb his name. He was rather helpful for the most part. Had I been more aware and less in shock over the whole concept of being 48 years old and working at a pizza place that I don't own, I might have taken more notice when he asked me, "So...are you closing tonight?"

The question really should have piqued my interest more. After all, my first job, at age 15, had been in a restaurant. Although I was technically the dishwasher at that time, I was essentially the complete slave of the place. The end of my shift last night had much the same sort of elements as that first job, albeit on a lesser scale. I had signed up to be a delivery guy, but I had been warned by my friend Robert that there were other associated tasks besides the driving. I knew, for example, that I would be making pizza boxes. I guess I hadn't stopped to consider that I, now 33 years past the labors and physical demands of that first job, would once again have someone point to a large tile floor and say, "You'll need to sweep and mop that." I was wholly unprepared for the moment when Captain started handing me dirty utensils and containers, and instructed me on the proper volume of water and mixture of chemicals to put the triple-well stainless steel industrial sink from hell.

I spent the last hour of my first day as a pizza delivery driver making $5.65 per hour, pushing a broom, wrestling a mop and doing dishes like a busboy, sweating like a stevedore. My arthritic hands and knees were crying the blues. My mind was busy considering the irony of the fact that I would probably be rendered unable to play the guitar and sing the composition my joints were working on, once I was finished with the mopping. No, I hadn't counted on this aspect of the job at all. I must have thought that I was going to drive clean, baby; cruise the streets of suburbia, bringing succulent, steaming junk food to adoring masses. I thought I was going to ride high in my Explorer, dashing through the night, assuaging the grumbling stomachs of Middle America, and reveling in my service to mankind.

By the time I left at midnight, headed for home after what had been, effectively, a seventeen-hour day, all such romantic notions of the life of a pizza delivery guy had left my head, replaced by a tired, chafing reality. And no free pizza.

More to come as more happens...

[Trilby]

Well, it's pretty obvious to me what you should be doing.

[Elspode]

Strangely, very little interest has ever been shown in paying me for my writing. I do receive many kind words from nice people like Cellarites. Certainly, I've made very little money at it in the real world.

I used to get paid to write for the UMKC U-News about seven years ago. My wife was then the Ad Manager and Arts and Entertainment Editor (the two most plum jobs on the staff for non-sports types, and even at that, I got to go shoot the Division I basketball home games). I was the Arts and Entertainment reviewer and Photo Editor. Now *that* little arrangement was sweet. Lots of free stuff like movies and concerts and promo items, plus a meager paycheck were ours each week. It was definitely my idea of a primo part time job. It was, in fact, much more like being paid to entertain yourself than being any real sort of work. I mean, I learned to shoot and develop black and white pictures just for fun, and there I was actually paid by the picture. Sigh.

Unfortunately, she graduated, and it all ended. I had to take at least one credit hour in order to classify as a "student" to be able to work for the paper, but I didn't even do that until I'd been at it for a few months. Even then, the class I took was a four-day local geology course that was held over two consecutive weekends, which was also big fun.

Life isn't nearly as fun or easy as it was back in those days.

Mari, no...I haven't delivered phone books, and Gods willing, I never will.

[busterb]

Mari. They have no dumpsters in CO?

[xoxoxoBruce]

No free pizza?

Patrick, you should write. You should be playing music (I understand how careful a guitarist has to be of his hands). What a travesty that you should be delivering pizza's. Oh well, whoever said life was fair? But I'm mad at life on your behalf.

And no, Busterb, dumpsters are not an option in my own little story. They have this computerized route checking system and if more than three people indicate that they didn't get their phone book, you don't get paid for the entire route.

[busterb]

Oh well, just an idea.

[Clodfobble]

Els, reading your account was hardcore deja vu for me. I worked for Domino's Pizza for 3 years. I was unfortunately too young to be a delivery driver--technically I was too young to be working at all in that environment (95 degrees was the cutoff I think, and the store usually ran about 105) for the first year, but what Child Labor Law enforcement folks don't know won't hurt them, right? Anyway, trust me, driving is at least a little better than being an insider. Once you get a little more familiar with your delivery area you'll get reasonable tips.

The thing about my experience was, in both of the stores I worked in, my best friend and I were the only two kids working there. Every other employee was 30+, and most were supporting families. One guy was semi-retired and did it for the camaraderie, but he was weird.

The food service industry sucks, but it does get a little better with experience. After awhile, you'll be adept at folding boxes without getting cut, you'll know that area of town like the back of your hand, and hopefully you'll be a little more relaxed throughout the evenings, which will help with the arthritis. And at the very least, you'll know you're working your ass off for a good cause: your family.

If you can, get one of the insiders to teach you how to toss dough. I can still do it, and it's a great party trick.

[elSicomoro]

Hang tough, Ep.

I've been thinking about doing pizza delivery myself, though I probably wouldn't do it in my own neighborhood...I dunno...

[flippant]

You are going to look back someday and laugh. Try it now just for practice...

[zippyt]

I could just see Syc delivering pizzas !!!!!

" Here is your FUCKING pizza !!!! Now where is my damn tip BITCH !!!!!!"

I feel for ya Splode , I delivered pizzas in southern Cali in the early 80's , !!!!!