2/25 Bad Tippers Beware?

I received the following comment on one of my earlier posts and decided to offer my thoughts today:

My name is Adam, I'm a driver from Florida. I got so fed up with people not tipping I made a website where drivers can post their tips and check their cities postings from their phone. My idea is that if drivers pool their knowledge of good and bad customers they can make better decisions on which order to take first. Anyway the site is goodtipbadtip.com, and I was wondering if you would link to it or maybe blog about it. I don't know how this works exactly. Let me know if you would like me to link to your blog too.

Thanks,
Adam

As a nerd I love the idea that there should be a predictor for tipping. I'm tracking my own tips and would love to work with other drivers in and outside my area to refine my methods, gather a larger and more significant data set, and put it into an easy-to-digest and useful format for other (less nerdy) drivers to use. Adam (if you're reading this), email me and if any of these ideas sound like something you'd like to flesh out more.

With all that said, my first thought when I visited the site is that I have a slight problem with posting customer's addresses. Even though they are bad tippers and it's extremely tempting to be vindictive (I've been tempted to kick my share of ceramic kitties/poodles/frogs) I'm concerned that, were the website to be a large success, the information could be used in ways not originally intended (a hit list for drunken former drivers to egg on Halloween, etc). I'm also concerned that if one of the chronic-bad-tippers were to discover this, the store and possibly the driver could be in trouble. I know it's a little far-fetched, but it is something to think about. People tend to frequent the same pizza places over and over again and if they felt that they weren't welcome as customers they might stop ordering from there altogether and, while I would rather not deliver to bad-tippers, business is business and without the store I don't have a job.

Honestly, I don't have a ton of control over which deliveries I take, so even if the pace in-store was such that I could whip out my cellphone and check the list, I probably wouldn't be able to do anything about it anyway; the dispatch system causes deliveries to be run on a first-come-first-served basis and my store pretty much sticks to that to prevent conflict (see previous entries about StinkyButtFace inventing his own dispatch system and how well that worked out).

Personally, I would be much more interested in it from a data standpoint. My current methodology is to try to figure out if certain neighborhoods tip more on average and deliver to higher tipping neighborhoods first (for example if I had a double to two close neighborhoods). It would be awesome (and much more statistically significant) if other drivers in my area were tracking this type of thing, but I'm not sure that any of the other drivers in my store would be interested; Most of them just don't take this job as seriously as some of us (including me) do.

****

Last night I took 8 deliveries and averaged $2.08 in tips per delivery. We had a freak rush after the Ash Wednesday church service got out. Came home with $25 in my pocket.

2/22 PizzaGirl to the rescue

Since I've been sick (bleh!) I forgot to write about my shift on Sunday. I only took 2 deliveries and made $9 but I made a friend out of Blond Bopper. Blond Bopper and Skinny Bopper were sticking fliers on boxes when Eyebrows came up and put his hand on Blond Boppers and "offered" to hold the boxes up while she dabbed glue. She politely declined but he refused to move his hand, so in order to stop touching him she had to agree to allow him to help. Then he tried to get in on the conversation and he would lean in very close before saying anything. To say the least, Blond Bopper was freaked out. For the rest of the night, I physically got between Blond Bopper and Eyebrows every time he looked like he was going to come over near us. In the end Blond Bopper got me a free soda from the fast food chain in our parking lot (she works there as well).

2/21 Carryout for Jesus

Amusing things tonight:

• On my way to work, I stopped at the local convenience store and saw the following advertisement and thought, "What do you get when your cow is a lesbian?" and then I thought, "What do you get when you milk a gay?"
• Happy Bopper razzing Caveman for the time he was working cut station and came on an order for Jesus (hey-sue-s) and yelled, "Carryout for Jesus."
• Bambi Bopper had on ridiculous eyeliner, she had drawn lashes on both her top and lower lids.  I was reminded of the makeup in "A Clockwork Orange".  
  
• A couple of giant simulated sheep in someone's yard.  There was a mama and baby, they had fallen over.  I wish I had a picture.
• A hat with sequins.
• A pink convertible.

Just one thing didn't amuse me, Mustache Manager was opening and she never stopped complaining and she took a thousand ciggy breaks.

I made $54 off of 14 deliveries (averaging $2.04 tip per delivery).

2/19 Skipping Work

I didn't go to work last night. I called in partly because my head was killing me (a lady at my primary job was wearing soooooo much perfume that I thought I was going to pass out) and partly because I am extremely burnt out.

Since I obviously couldn't order delivery for dinner, I decided to pick up some pizza from my local Papa Murphy's. I was severely disappointed by some of the changes they've made since the last time I was there. First, they have greatly reduced their selection. I went in, fully intending to try something new and different, but instead of the multitude of alternative options that were previously offered, there were two or three. I ended up trying the DeLite Mediterranean Pizza. On top of that, they have stopped doing a pizza of the week special and started having set combos.

The food quality has also suffered during their corporatization. The crust on my pepperoni was cheaper tasting, instead of being thicker and chewy it was thinner with less edge. The DeLite (which I had never tried before) was not even as good as my store's thin crust (which I generally don't like) and was actually rather hard on the edges rather than just crunchy or crispy. Even the ingredients have suffered; the dried tomatoes were super-salty (meaning there was nothing to balance the salty cheese and salty chicken), the pepperoni was greasier and less tasty, the cheese was less plentiful.

I realize that cutting corners is necessary sometimes (we've stopped carrying a couple of the special sauces that we used to offer on pizza and our new wing-saucing methedology is far from perfect) but it should never happen at the expense of a quality dining experience.

12/18 They should know better

Took 7 deliveries tonight and started my demographics project.  Teen boys weren't helped by the fact that I had to deliver to Thing One and Thing 2 (who should know better!!!) who only tipped me $1.   I found a street whose numbers don't match up on the opposite sides, which made it very confusing to find the house I was looking for.

Made $24 tonight.

12/17 Little Nicky

It's almost not worth blogging about the one hour I spent at work yesterday with zero deliveries. The only thing worth noting is that we have a new driver. We've actually had him for a few shifts, I just didn't have a good nickname for him yet. He is officially now dubbed LittleNicky because he talks out of the side of his mouth.

Hopefully the rest of the week won't be so dreadfully dull.

2/15 A Break

Last night was a break of sorts. I realized that I've been a little grouchy at work (possibly because I'm there all the time and more than a little burnt out) so I tried hard to get back to my old self. I used to be helpful and happy and joking. I don't know if I succeeded, but I at least tried.

I took a delivery to a guy whose beard made his chin/neck look like a butt. His beard was just a thin line outlining where his jaw-line should have been with a line coming up the middle from where his chin should have been to his bottom lip. The only problem was that his goiter was already shaped like a butt and so the middle line made a nice butt-crack. The effect was a lot like a woman who uses lip-liner to create lips where she has none. It looked ridiculous. Did I mention that he "forgot" to fill out the tip and total lines on the credit card and when I asked him to do so he scoffed and pointedly asked me what the total was again (even though it was written on the receipt) and gave me no tip. This guy makes me want to start an anonymous snail-mail campaign to non-tippers.

I'm thinking of starting a new statistical study to determine if there is any relevance of a person's age, race, sex, or wealth to tipping. I will classify each person as youth, young, mid, or old and will classify wealth by the neighborhood they live in (low, average, mid , and high). Though this will only be relevant to my geographic area it should at least be interesting. I'm thinking that I'll need a sample of at least 100 deliveries over at least 4 weeks.

I brought home $23 last night.

2/13, 2/14 Nothing Says Love Like Fungus

***WARNING***at some point during the following rant I may curse....a lot.

It seems like the last couple of days the Pizza Gods have been on a mission to piss me off.  Friday night they let the boppers on the cut station again.  What was cute once, was not cute in encore.  First I caught Bambi boxing garlic Parmesan breadsticks in a box for a plain cheese pizza.  Then they didn't put any dipping sauce in my wings.  On my way to that delivery I was venting to Other Chick Driver that it would be ironic if they didn't sauce the actual wings.  When I got to the delivery I decided to check, because you really can't take anything for granted when the boppers are fucking things up.  They hadn't put any sauce on the wings whatsoever!  So I had to go back to the store, sauce the wings, then make another trip out to the house.  I was sooooooo pissed off!

Last night I was scheduled till 8.  It was Valentine's Day so we were selling a ton of retarded heart-shaped pizzas.  Nothing says love like a mushroom heart pizza; you know that guy got laid last night.  Anyway, we were super busy so I took deliveries until 8:30 thinking that I would come back, stock the Pepsi cooler (as was my posted end-of-night job) and make it to a movie.  Instead, as I was going to stock the Pepsi cooler I find out that they posted the real end-of-night jobs and I have dishes.  Dishes had been getting neglected all day, so nothing was done, practically every dish in the store was dirty, and I was Pissed.  At 10:15 I finally bitch at ArmyCook enough that if his fucking closing drivers had enough time to stand around eating chicken strips and yapping they had enough time to do the dishes since I as supposed to get off at 8 and he (or El Jefe) had already completely fucked up my Valentine's Day by not doing their job and posting end-of-night jobs in a timely manner.  Had I know I had dishes I would have started them at 7 or 7:30 at the latest.  Here's a big shoutout to BigBlack who also had dishes and, despite the fact that his back was killing him, was an awesome team-mate and put up with my griping and understands my hatred of floaties.

Some bright spots:

• Christmas lights in a bush.  They weren't turned on, but the light reflecting off the street light made them sparkle a little and it was surprisingly beautiful.
• Clouds that looked like Jupiter's.
• A man wearing a black long-sleeved shirt that on second look had little pink and purple flower appliques on the collar.

How I injured myself:

• I slammed my head into the corner of the drivers table while standing up from picking up my driver-ticket off the floor.  I hit it so hard I cried a little.

2/12 Musings

The following things do not belong on a pizza:

• Anchovies - what are we killer whales?
• Fresh tomatoes - because they are gross and difficult to make pretty when cutting the pizza
• Ricotta cheese sauce - it has the consistency of runny snot and has mystery red flakes in it

God bless the person who thought to put the following on a pizza:

• Bacon - no explanation needed
• chicken - somehow chicken, cheese, and tomato sauce is just a delicious combination
• Jalapenos - now if I could just get someone to find a way to work in a salsa pizza sauce

Made $41 last night on 10 deliveries, which means I averaged exactly $3 in tips per delivery. We were busy again. I don't know if it's that we are short-staffed or that we're unusually busy this week. It seems that whenever they schedule more people, we end up being dead slow.

2/11 Missing the Hustle

Driver's rock! No matter our reputation for being lazy (which is only occasionally true), our store would have fallen apart last night had it not been for the awesome job that we drivers did. Stoner Manager, Old Bopper, Happy Bopper, and Bambi Bopper just didn't have the hustle to deal with the freak Wednesday night rush. Make time was over 25 minutes, I didn't deliver a single on-time pizza. Despite all of that I made pretty good tips. I took 9 deliveries and walked out with $40 ($3.35 average tip per delivery).

2/9 A Eulogy (of sorts)

We were slowish last night, so instead of writing about my five boring deliveries I offer a eulogy (of sorts) for StinkyButtFace:

StinkyButtFace was a terrible person. I will not miss his scowl when things weren't going his way. I will not miss his smirk when he has gleefully ruined the day of another driver, bopper, or manager. I will not miss getting my runs stolen or listening to customers complain about how unintelligible he is on the phone. I will not miss him flying off the handle and threatening people. I will not miss the way that he would race from the back of the store to the front every time the phone rang just so that he could make sure to mis-quote the price to the customer and therefore guarantee himself a bigger tip. But most of all, I will not miss they way that he would only cut his slices out of the crew-pie on Saturday mornings, leaving the rest of the pizza uncut and polluting our delicious extra-meaty slices with his onions and bell peppers.

StinkyButtFace, wherever you are, you are not missed. I hope that you never get a delivery job again. I hope that you are miserable and that whoever you are inflicting your misery on at home gets fed up with it and leaves you. Most of all, I hope that you don't go crazy and decide to shoot up and/or bomb the store because I'm there six days a week and therefore likely to die.

2/8 Back to Normal

Now that Stinky is gone, things are getting back into a nice rhythm. Last night we were short on Boppers and unusually busy for a Sunday. I spent a lot of time on the cut station even when my deliveries were already ready because if I left pizzas would fall on the floor. Pizzas did fall on the floor, though not due to my negligence. El Jefe was pissed.

Saturday was fairly slow. I still walked out with over $60 but it was hard-won. I saw a house which had a sign outside that had the names of everyone in the family (and their pets). Normally I wouldn't think anything of it, but that day, I couldn't help thinking that it isn't really very safe for strangers to know the names of the kids and pets in the house. Kids will trust someone just because that stranger knows their name and talks to them about Fluffy. I honestly hope that someone brings it to the attention of the parents.

I was amused by:

• Tiny adorable woodland ceramic bunnies on either side of a tiny ceramic vicious alligator.
• The chihuahua that is still so fat that it is rejecting it's eyeballs and the fact that its owners have given up on ordering a Diet Pepsi with their double-bacon pizza and desert and just decided to order double-bacon pizza and two deserts.
• Other Chick Driver
• Manwhore Manager's winter tan because it is really really orange and men that tan are amusing in general
  

2/5 The Defeat of my Archnemesis

Tonight StinkyButtFace got fired by Stoner Manager.  Stinky has a sneaky way of inflating his tips, he rips the total sticker off of the box and tells the customer a higher total than their real total at the door.  For example, tonight's customer's order was $28.99 and he told them $29.99 so that he could pocket the extra dollar.  This particular customer called to complain about it and Stoner Manager finally got fed up with being forced to cover for Stinky stealing from customers (this isn't the first time he's pulled a stunt like this).  Apparently Stoner Manager called and gave El Jefe a him-or-me ultimatum and El Jefe chose Stoner Manager...for now.  Stinky is going in tomorrow to talk to El Jefe (and presumably plead for his job back).

2/4 Bambi Bopper's Big Cut-Station Debut

Imagine Bambi Bopper (formerly Dumb Bopper; She's still dumb, but the deer-in-the-headlights look she gets and the alliteration are just too much for me not to memorialize) and Skinny Bopper standing around the cut station.  Pizzas are coming out at a moderate pace; One good driver could handle the flow by themselves.  Now picture a pizza coming out that has no home.  This pizza has tomatoes.  Bambi Bopper stares at the pizza for a second , stares at the boxes, makes a motion like she's going to pick a box but none of them indicate a pizza that has tomatoes, stares at the pizza again, stares into space, stares at the boxes again (squinting this time just to make sure that none of them say tomatoes), stares at the pizza again, thinks about asking someone if there should be a box, stares at Skinny Bopper, stares at the pizza again.  Meanwhile, Skinny Bopper is helping on the cut station.  She is in charge of getting the pizzas from the oven to the table.  So while Bambi Bopper has gone tharn (I just finished reading Watership Down, so sorry if you don't get the reference), Skinny Bopper is taking the pizzas out of the oven and lining them up in a neat line behind (to left of ) the tomato pizza.  Meanwhile, MonkeyWrench and I are standing at the driver station with our backs to the cut station, because we are laughing so hard.  Finally, Stoner Manager realizes that no pizzas are getting into boxes and goes to the rescue of his perplexed darling.  It turns out that the stickers for that order didn't print, which really was a gift from the Pizza Gods because it made my night a lot more amusing.

In case you don't believe me about the deer-in-the-headlights look:

We have a new kind of box for our wings.  They're rectangular instead of square.  Bambi Bopper and Happy Bopper were standing around folding boxes and Bambi gets the look and says, "Do the flaps go in or out?" and Happy Bopper, obviously caught off guard, says, "Why would the flaps go outside?"

Boppers never cease to amuse me.  Except when I'm actually trying to get something done.  Which tonight I was not.

1/30,31 An Accident, A Dog, and the Super Bowl

There is this intersection in my town that it awful. I usually avoid it. It is a four lane road with a 60 mile per hour speed limit and neighborhoods along one side. The problem is that there is no turn lane and it's a very busy road going both directions. I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this. Imagine a string of cars in the left lane, traveling along at a normal pace and all the sudden the front one stops to turn into the neighborhood. The car behind them swerves around into the right lane. I was the car behind that car. I was the car that rear-ended the stopped car. Of course I was on duty. I had to call and get Day Driver to come get the pizza.

Did I mention that the lady I rear-ended was crazy? First, she kept the car stopped in the middle of the road for like 10 minutes. I immediately pulled off to the side. Then some teenagers that know her pulled up and walked out into the middle of the road to make sure she was okay. I honestly tried to tell them that in Texas it is illegal to block traffic with a minor accident. After that the cops arrived. Crazy had called them out as a hit and run! 1. It was not a hit and run, if Crazy had bothered to calm herself down and look around she would have seen me on the side of the road. 2. My license plate # was imprinted on her bumper. 3. I had a giant lit up pizza sign on top of my car, it wouldn't be that hard to track me down, so why would I run. Anyway, the cops got there, and half an hour later, surprise, surprise (just like I told Crazy when she finally pulled over the side and I walked over and gave her all my insurance stuff) they didn't issue any citations, didn't make an accident report, just handed us print outs with which to exchange information.

Went back to work after that. The rest of the night was okay. Tips were okay. I ended up with a little bit of whiplash (which nicely compliments my flue but more about that later).

****

I closed Saturday night. I was already getting sick, but the tips weren't too bad. Walked out the door with $65.

What is with people and their pets? I delivered to a super rich house and they had a white Bull Terrier. This dog was going absolutely nuts. The man had it by the collar and had managed to wrestle it to a sitting position and it was barking and snapping and generally acting that a crazy inbred dog. So the woman signs her receipt and takes the pizza and the man is cooing about what a good dog he's been and turns to me and says, "He was such a good dog, you have to come introduce yourself." I don't know what possessed me to actually think that this was a decent idea, but I reached in just enough for the dog to sniff me and it started snapping at me and even nipped me a little. Lesson to self: owners of crazy dogs are even crazier.

****

I spent yesterday sick, I'm still sick today, so I missed working on Super Bowl Sunday. Apparently it wasn't that busy but when I called in El Jefe refused to come to the phone. He told Thing One to tell me that I had to come in. I couldn't even walk let alone drive, so I stayed home. I don't even know who won the game I was so out of it.