11/28-29 Ankle Deep in Mud

OK, let's start with a few staffing changes:

• Monkeywrench (Dirty Stripper) moved to Alabama because CPS told her the only way they were going to stop hounding her and threatening to take her kids away was if she moved out of state. I'll be honest, I would consider taking away those kids too if I were them.
  
• Thing One and Thing Two no call-no showed one time too many, so they don't work here anymore.
• I can't keep track of all the boy boppers. They all look the same! So we're going to call them all Boy Bopper except for Asian Bopper who is our new boss bopper (because he rocks) and Robot Bopper (who it turns out is good on makeline if you tell him what to do).

Hmmm, Saturday... It was slow for most of the day. I read over a hundred pages in And Another Thing... (which I'm actually liking). During the evening I discovered that GoogleMaps did some sort of "upgrade" and streets that used to be marked correctly are now misnamed and go places that have no roads (like the middle of fields and through the woods). On the plus side, all of the dog grooming salons are clearly marked! Luckily I usually only need to remember what neighborhood a particular street is in, but I'd hate to be a new driver trying to take one of the hiking trails now marked as roads.

We were busy all night Saturday (the bottleneck was ArmyCook being slow on the dough station), all day Sunday, and all night Sunday (the bottleneck being Cute-Girl Bopper and Boy Boper doing makeline). I really wanted to take a cattle prod to that girl. She was putting ham on a pizza and would put one on every four seconds, I counted. Ham...pause, two, three...ham...pause,two, three. All of which basically meant that I was taking deliveries that were less than ten minutes out of the oven but were forty minutes to an hour after the time they ordered.

Amusing things:

• My damn the man - Pepsi shipped us a shit ton of 20 ounce Pepsi Max's and no one buys them, so we're supposed to be taking them on deliveries and giving them away to customers for free. I don't like them, but I've been hoarding them for a friend. I have a dozen in my back seat.
• A thirteen-ish Asian kid in a Santa suit on the side of the road standing next to a slightly older boy who's holding a sign that has "Pictures With Santa" spray-painted on it.
• A guy who ordered one pizza and four orders of our chocolate pastries. He tipped me $5 online and tried to hide the blunt he was smoking when I got there.
• An outline of a person on the sidewalk of a house. This house also had a pepper plant in the front yard with some cute red peppers hanging from it. (Of course, not getting tipped was not amusing).
• Jolly christmas decorations. I'm a bit picky about holiday lights. I like multi-colored, lights everywhere, non-blinking lights, those icicle lights, and big light-up longhorns. I dislike all-red lights, snowmen with disproportionately large heads, lights that are blinking so quickly as to be almost seizure inducing, broadcast Christmas carols, yards that have so many blowups and decorations that they look cluttered, and blowups that try to be witty (think flamingos instead of reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh).
• A customer wearing one of those tourist shirts that has "Bahama" embroidered across the front with palm trees and flamingos.
• Watched two cars run (right turn on red without stop) our photo-enforced traffic light. I could almost feel the city smile at its two new shiny $90 tickets.
  

Not amusing:

• First thing Sunday morning, my keys fell off my keychain again. This time the person with the spare key wasn't as close-by and had to leave work to come let me into my car.
• Sometime while locked out of my car I lost my pen. I realized this at my next delivery when I didn't have one. They found their own pen, tipped me $5 and then when I offered them cheese and peppers I discovered that I hadn't brought any (very unusual for me). I managed to scrounge one packet of each from my car (no telling how old they are).
• Threw up (very nearly in a customer's yard). No more eggnog milkshakes for breakfast.
• A man called and ordered pizza delivered to his house for his wife. He didn't tell her he was ordering pizza, in fact, he was out of town traveling so she didn't even know that it was a possibility. So she thought it was a mistake. After a bit of arguing and phone calls it was straightened out but she still stiffed me.
• It was raining. I hate when people comment on the rain and then stiff me. How is it that they can afford $25 in pizza (we're the most expensive of the four chains that deliver in my area) but can't afford to tip me $3?
• Almost ran out of gas. I swear the car was running off my life-force by the time I made it to the third delivery in my triple. I had to fill him up with premium because I promised I would if he didn't strand me on a country road.
• Waded ankle-deep in mud to make a delivery. They tipped $5, but I'd rather have taken $3 and not gotten muddy. I had to scrounge fast-food napkins from my car to get the big chunks off my shoes before I could get in the car. My shoes were still super-muddy. I left big muddy footprints all over the store (even after wiping my feet on the mat).

For Saturday I made $45 in tips (off $464 in sales, a tip percentage of 9.7%, and an average tip of $2.80) off 16 deliveries.
On Sunday I made $92 total off 25 deliveries ($65 in tips, an average tip of $2.60).

11/27 Saving Energy

Only took 3 deliveries tonight. The first was to "the one who bears the name of The Evil One" who stiffed me (she technically let me keep .85 in change but I don't round up under a dollar). Of course she's done this before, so when I was on the cut station and I saw her pizza coming out and that it was my delivery, I made sure her request for well-done pizza didn't happen.

My second delivery was a $5 tip.

The third one was to someone outside putting up Christmas lights. I hit the curb pulling up. As he was signing the receipt I chatted about how he was putting up my favorite kind of lights (the kind that look like big gumdrops on a gingerbread house). He commented that this year he switched to LEDs and was excited about the amount of money he'd save on his electricity bill. I thought that was funny because he had a giant blow-up Santa and a giant blowup snow globe and a giany blowup snowman, all of which are huge power-hogs. I thought it was hypoctritical and douchey when he gave me a dollar tip.

We have a new driver, CG Driver (because he has that not-quite-real quality), and a new Bopper, Beauregarde Bopper (because she reminds me of an "after" shot of Violet).

Came out with $10 off of three deliveries.

Damn straight this came from my iPhone

11/22 Frowny-faces and gold stars

I hereby award these customers frowny-faces:

• Got stiffed, this one very purposefully folded the receipt with the text to the inside after writing a big fat zero in the tip section. No need for that! If you're going to be an asshole, own it!
• Stiffed again when someone pulled the "signed the receipt so fast without looking" thing to make me think they just overlooked the fact that there's a tip line.
• Went to the house and it turns out that the guy ordered online and didn't update his address or phone number and no longer lived at that address.

and gold stars to these customers:

• The same guy as the last frowny-face. He called back to cancel the order and it turned out he lives just out of our delivery area so I offered to deliver it to him (I'll take one of those gold stars!). He gave me a $7 tip.
• I normally don't award gold stars to change-givers, but this one put hers in a ziplock bag (and it added up to $5.
• Sometimes adequate tipping is more than adequate. Like when I thought I was getting stiffed by the teenager and the mom caught him and filled in $3 with a nice loud lecture on tipping. Go mom!

Hmmm, store gossip:

• Ferngully doesn't work here anymore. Apparently she was living with one of our boy-band boppers' parents and she punched the dad in the face and they kicked both of them out. I can't imagine cute little Ferngully doing such a thing.
• Gelwyn apparently lives in the RV park that I hate delivering to because I always feel like i'm going to get dragged into one of those dark RVs and murdered, my bloated corpse being discovered three states away when a neighbor complains of the stench.
• OCD either lied or negligently looked at the schedule Saturday night. She was taking the end of my shift (from about 4:30 to 7) and I'd hooked her up with a babysitter for that time. She told the babysitter that I was wrong and got off at 9. They were pissed at me because they thought I'd lied so they'd say ok to babysitting her two monsters (really, they're not very nice children). Sunday morning I got in, verified my shift was till 7. I'm going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she just mis-looked, but I wouldn't put it past her to lie so that she could pick up a few more hours.
• J/K was sporting some mirrored shades and the chin-strap beard. It was ridiculous and very very amusing.
  

Came out with $33 off 9.

11/21 Race to Dissapointment

Saturday started pretty well; I got everything done early and a $6 tip on my first delivery. Then I delivered to the firestation and my keys fell off my keychain meaning I locked myself out of the car (with two more deliveries sitting in my front seat). So I got to loiter outside the firestation while my ex who lives in town came and let me in with the spare key. Then, when I finally got to the last delivery in that run the weight of the pizzas had pretty much crushed the box, the corners were kinda bent up and there was a grease spot on the top from the box having contact with the pizza. I felt awful for delivering a pizza in that condition. They didn't call and complain but I almost offered to remake it.

My least fun delivery came when I went to deliver a $60 order marked as cash-payment. Lil Nicky told me the lady would give me a check and I'd have to call it in (he was also previously bragging "that's how you close a deal!" since he got them to order a side, a dessert, and a drink). So I get to the door and the husband answers (the wife called in originally and didn't have her check information handy for us to pre-run). I try to get payment and he says it's already paid for online. I was thoroughly confused because I knew this was a phone order. Then a delivery car for a rival pizza chain drives up and the guy figures it out. His wife told him we had "declined" her check and had cancelled the order, so they ordered online from the rival chain. So I was left with four pizzas, cheese-sticks, and a dessert that had to go back to the store. We ended up trading the pizzas for food from Sonic across the parking lot, but it was still a huge waste of time. What makes this story even sadder is that even though they had to have ordered from the rival chain a few minutes later than they ordered from us, we got there at the same time.

Came out with $33 off 9.

11/20 Good Mood

I've been in a great mood all night.* It's been misty out but not cold; I've got holiday parties coming up; and my life seems to be on a path, don't know which one that is yet, but I have a feeling that there's a subplot going on that I'm not noticing and will turn out to be important.

I ran 10 deliveries tonight. Two of which were $5 tips. One of those and one of my $4 tippers were teenage boys who I'm pretty sure tipped me more for being a girl. My only stiff tonight came from a guy who later called the store threatening to sue because some Bopper took him order wrong and heard "cheese" instead of "meat". This is exactly the kind of guy I was taking about in my last post. He feels that he's entitled to whatever he can get away with an has obviously bullied his way into plenty of free meals.

Something funny happened at the end of my shift though... I was cashing out and El Jefe suddenly remembers that he saw something for me up in the cabinet. He pulls out an envelope with my name written on it and a 5 dollar bill inside. I was perplexed until I remembered this guy who tried to pay with a $100 and I didn't have change and said he'd drop my tip off at the store. I assume that the 5 must be from him. So gold star for following through on his promise.

Walked out with $40 off those 10 deliveries.

*Wrote this Friday night right after my shift.