Top 3 Delivery Moments: Catch up anyone?

This is essentially why I started this blog or got at all excited about this job, I need stories to tell.

So, in as near as I can remember here are the most interesting experiences I have had outside the store.

1 My first Delivery: So my first one; I get all geared up with pizza and nervously type in the address to my GPS and study the map so I don’t get lost.  I arrive and find the house and park.  Drivers are given a sticker with instructions on it, such as ‘knock’, ‘use backdoor’, or ‘this person paid with a credit card, don’t forget the slip.’

I forgot the slip.

So I knock on the door to give em the pizza anyhow and this old man answers.  Naturally I assume he’s responsible for the  three pizzas I hand him.  I quickly apologize and run to the car looking for SOMETHING this man can sign in lieu of a receipt.  Got nothin.  Meanwhile old man has gone inside and come out again even more confused by me.  He waves me inside to discuss the matter.

Little did I know this man wasn’t the head honcho, just a sort of live in butler for the two of the largest people I have seen in real life.  They ask questions from the remarkable strength of their Lay-z-boys and we get it sorted out.  Just as I’m sayin ’sorry’ for the umpteenith time, BOOM, big ‘ol fat gob of drool falls out of the eternal manservant’s mouth onto the the carpet.  No one. Says. Anything.  I left.

2  I got trapped in a Nursing Home:  So I’m deliverying a pizza to the nursing home.  I have to call when I arrive because the slip says so.  “2nd floor” is the destination.  I call.

“Hi this is Cathy can I help you?” says the lady on the phone

“Hi, I’ve got a pizza to deliver here,”

“Okay I’ll patch you through to em,”

(Insert lovely  music and a soothing voice), “…for your loved ones.  Think about it today, and make the right choice”

“Hello?”

“Hi this is the pizza guy,”

“Oh they didn’t pick up, it’s Cathy still, hang on”

(Holding) “…our program for people with behavioral or mood problems, we call it our Colors program…”

(At this point I’m anticipating having to walk past all the dulled crayons in the Colors program)

“Hello?”

“Is this Cathy?” I ask

“Yeah, why don’t you just come inside?”

I entered and walked past rooms like pet adoption kennels.  Folders on the walls before you enter with medical information and pleas of “Don’t keep walking, I love visitors!” from little signs adorned with Jesus, or puppies.

I walked to the desk and was asked the name of the deliveree, I had no idea.  So I run back to the car to get the slip.  I come back and begin getting lead up the stairs by someone apparently allowed to just walk around the place.

“We’ll go upstairs” she says, “I THINK there’s another pizza man up here already, he was here just before you…think he’s up here already,”  I don’t have the heart or patience to explain that was just me running to my car and coming back…it really isn’t that important.

Get upstairs and deliver the goods, head out.  The staircase ends in the lobby for the residents, TV’s in the big lounge where everyone stares at the floor, or whoever happens to be at the top of the stairs.  They all stare at me as I fidget with the handle and realize this door has a keypad lock.  I ask a nurse for help.  After sorting some more drugs and getting a pen out from under a confiscated Hank WIlliams Jr. CD, she writes the code down for me.  I rush to the steps.

I go downstairs in a bit of a rush because I’ve spent far too much time here at this point.  Go to leave but the door’s locked.  I go to the keypad and enter the number.  Nothin…  There is a a large metal button left that just seems to go someplace up in the ceiling, I’m beside the proper door and a door that says “Don’t open or the alarm will sound and everyone will know you got trapped in a stairwell”

I try the keypad again, and again, and finally go upstairs and try that keypad, it works.  Though now I have to walk back in front of the poorly entertained ancient masses and ask for more help.

Apparently that button in the button to press to get out, but with no labels I wasn’t about to just push some random button…I ride down the elevator with Charles…staring at the floor.

3. Short Story about how I maybe fixed a problem.

So I go to this ladies house, I had been off work and got called back in because it was stoopid busy, so I go there and give her the pizza and the total is 17.63 or something like that.  She’s gives me a 20 and I have NO change…like none at all anywhere that I can call mine.  I ask if she needs change, hoping for a tip on the late night (Tips get fewer as the night goes on). She want’s the 2 dollars and change back.  I fumble in my pockets and go to my car for the added impression that I really am looking though I KNOW I am screwed in this situation.  She caves and gives me the money as a tip.  I feel awful.

Next day, I drop off a package in her mailbox.  $2.37 with a not apologizing for not having change yesterday.  I dunno if she got it, or felt insulted, or what really…I hope it worked out.

Most intersting things that aren’t full stories:

Weirdest place delivered to: A SemiTruck, got paid in a fist full of change

Best tip: $7.50

most pizza’s delivered at once: 7

Mistakes made: Forgot Credit card Recipt, Gone to the wrong House, Drove to the South side of a street instead of the North,

Deliveries that wern’t ment to be: 1, some dude must have fallen asleep before I got there and wouldn’t answer his phone (I had no door to knock on for hi, apartment buildings and all)

That’s it for now…caught up mostly, with the interesting stuff at least.

“You work here right?”

( sorry for the delay on updates, I’ve been working…go figure)

I walk in, day two of supposedly working expecting to learn some about making pizzas and such.  The Boss said that’s what’d I’d be doing anyway.  Turns out, he’s not there.  The Teacher is though, koala in tow.  I finally got the code for the back door, a poorly guarded and easily guessed secret.   Passwords just don’t have the same weight up there as they do in the rest of life, for example…

You know how people generally have about 3 passwords they use for EVERYTHING? I had to make one for my timeclock so I just borrowed from another of multipurpose passwords.  I regretted it around the 4th time I had to tell it to my boss so he could clock me out (standard procedure apparently).  I regretted it again the next day when I had to do pretty much the same thing for the night shift manager.  Now I gotta bake up some new memorable passwords.

Anyway, I’m there for all of 2 seconds when a very short man, turns and asks if I can make one of the items on the screen.  So I start piecing this sandwich thing together based on the pictures on the wall as all around me people come and go and shout things and hit bells and essentially flow through work while I build a house of cards from sandwich bread and meat.

Toss it in the oven and there’s another, and another, and another.

By now I’m feeling alright, gettin the hang of things when I hear a loud plop.  Pizza’s,  much like open-faced sandwich and anything else that has one side more important than the other, land face down.  The oven is simply a conveyor belt that moves the food through the heat.   There is supposed to be someone catching them at the other end, maybe that was supposed to be me.  I have a inconvenient habit of looking like I know what I’m doing when I have no clue.  Useful occasionally, but now it just resulted in a grease stain and a late pizza.  I go back to the simple comfort of making sandwiches.

PLOP.  Pizza number two.  I’m half tempted to make an I Love Lucy joke and start eating off the conveyor belt, stuffing food into boxes, making wide eyed faces, but no one seems too amused.  I do it in my head as I add the appropriate toppings to the replacement pizza.

After about an hour, The Teacher comes up and says “So, this your second day?”

“yep”

“You divin’ for us?”

“You wanna take a lil ride along Bert here?”

At this point  Bert smiles, eyes looking for a friend.  He’s on older man, 60’s or so. Little bumps spot his neck and face, I’m not sure what they are but he seems like the type of fellow to take pills for them.  We go to his truck.

Boxes are stacked and crammed everyplace they can be.  Pizza delivery information is printed on a special sticker for the driver.  After you deliver the pizza the sticker is useless.  Thousands of useless stickers live here.  There’s an occasionally food wrapper, but it’s mostly the trash left from living.

As we drive to deliver a pizza to an office park he gives me the run down of streets, which goes over my head (and has stayed there for now), and some warnings about how far I can push the cops before they pull me over.  We arrive.

Delivering a pizza in tandem with someone is a good deal like putting your name on a gift at the last second, as if when Bert handed them the pizza I would chime in “That’s from all of us,”  We enter and stand around with the security guard, Bert talkin a mile a minute to make everyone more at ease, it’s quite discomforting.  Eventually the lady  arrives, we switch the goods for the cash and walk out.  Back in the vehicle, Bert begins scratching down numbers on a pad that would have been right at home on the floor next to a Butterfinger wrapper. He mumbles as he does his computation and comes up with, “$21. 75.  I’ve got $16.50 from tips and then with driving expenses (we get .90 for a delivery and .30 for the second if we’re already out), so $21.75. Not bad, not bad”  I imagine it plays out the same every time, a hasty friendliness followed by necessary greed and calculation.  He mentioned this is his second job, he works at a grocery store full-time.  “That extra money’s nice, the tip,” he says, “most fellas they say that, that the extra money’s good for goin out and doin this in that, I say, I say that’s extra moeny for bills!” he laughs and recalculates.

We did another run, and I feel awkward before we leave the store.  Knowing I get to stand there as silent partner makes it feel like I’m intruding.  But we hop in the are and Bert hands me a flashlight.  I say flashlight but it’s more of a light-cannon.  This baby can pump out the lumens.  We get in the neighborhood and and can’t see and addresses.  I flip the switch and start worrying if I can cross the beams or not as a shaft of daylight shots onto the wrong house.  It’s about 11 pm.  We find the right one and Bert checks the tag, “deliver upstairs, around back” it says.  He grunts at this.

“Shine the light up there so they know we’re coming,”

I look at him.  The house is dark, and now I’m wondering if it’s the right one.  My mind jumps to a sting of curses my father would let out if someone projected the Light of God into his house this late at night.  I prepare the Nuremberg defense.

Shining bright lights on people kind of makes you feel like the cops.  There’s a weird sort of authority that comes with being able to make something visible.

Anyhow, we deliver it and go about our business.  Bert adds his numbers again and we return.

Not too bad all things considered.

First Day, Audio Tour!

A real gem here.  I go in for my first day, and the big guy from HR is there  makin everyone act like the teacher came back into the room after being away for 15 min dealing with a ‘problem kid’.  I enter the Boss’s closet/office and ask for a shirt and hat.  He offers me a woman’s medium and and extra large.  I take the extra large.

While I’m suiting up, HR comes into the office in a buzz of professional excitement and welcomes me to the team.  The Boss is trying to get something out of the cabinet, I’m trying to dress, and HR needs computer access for…something.  Picture the three of us in our various modes, all awkwardly trying to pretend that we’re not awkwardly close together, some of us not in all of our clothes.

HR leaves and I finish dressing,  at which point the Boss just decides to ask me about my car instead of walking the 40 necessary feet to inspect it.  Despite the new clothes I feel a little dirty.  He asks about insurance, it’s in my parents name and that creates issues.  “No worries” boss interjects “You can just forge it, they won’t know”  all laughs and smiles…

Things get serious on the make line and the Boss gets to work, but not before handing me a CD player and disc to listen to while walking around the story with the handbook.  Another employee, “Tyler”, asks my name.  As I fit the earbuds to my ears and press play he calls out “Welcome to the worst day of your life!”

The cord on the headphones is all of 3 inches long.  This means it hangs about chest level.  There is a CD in the player already, identical to the CD in the case.  I figure they are the same and hit play.  The CD begins…with the origin of the company.  By this point I’m mouthing along the key points and seeing what Tyler’s getting at. 

About 4 min into it I start thinking, “Is this the wrong CD?” It looking the copy of the one I was handed doesn’t mean they aren’t just poorly labeled.  So I swicth CDs, and listen to the origin of the company begin anew.

This being an old CD player , I fast forward at about 2x speed. These tracks, incidentally, are all about 9 minutes long.  I finally catch up and am instructed to go outside.  So I amble my way to the door and step out, only then realizing I have a permanently crooked hand at my chest holding a CD player with my head cocked towards my other hand trying to read along.  Imagine it if you will…perhaps a giggle or titter to yourself.

Absurdity follows me back inside.

After the description of the lobby.  I try to enter the back area again only to find the door locked.  I ask to be let it.  An old foreign gentlemen, Bernard, approaches and points to a light beside the door. He then walks away, instead of just opening the door, and presses a button to make the light come on and the door unlock.  I walk in to see Tyler, reveling in my bafflement.

The CD plays on till I find a hiatus in the walk in cooler.  Pizza places are very hot, the oven takes up about 70% of the store, and it breathes like fat people at a theatre, hot and labored. 

At this point, I’m fairly lost.  I feel like a kid who just watched a video on car repair in order to fix the dent in his parent’s vehicle.  I have no idea where to start.

I drop off the headphones and ask the Boss what next?  He shows me how to make pizza dough.

Despite my seemingly negative comments, this man can craft a pie. Quickly.  I still don’t have any idea what’s going on.  The CD mentioned 2 things that piqued my interest however: Popping bubbles on pizza with a special bubble popping fork, and a Spoodle, the bastard child of a spoon and a ladle.  Spoons are the cranberries of kitchen utensils, they’re in everything.  My questions are put on hold until next I work.

Next, Day Two! Hands on…

Pizza Class and the State of Your Soul

So I went to class.  It was located just behind the actual store so I had 0 chance of getting lost.  I arrived about 15 minutes early and was greeted by a man I’ll call Bob.  Bob’s got a nice hook to his nose that may have been passed down from an old drunk or a boxer.  He held a file of papers in one hand and gently rubbed the fine material of his American Legion windbreaker with the other.  Small talk began as it usually does, starting with the weather and progressing to the faults of others. The instructor hadn’t arrived yet and that left me listening to Bob explain the complexities of the “Internest” and how hard it was to get this paperwork done.  I stared down the road trying to pretend that I didn’t just want desperatly to leap into the oncoming lanes of traffic…just to spice things up a bit.

The Teacher arrived and greeted us with big smiles and a bigger gut, this man could have been starting his maternity leave. It wouldn’t be as bad if he didn’t seem to have a habit of rocking his hips back while leaning on something so the stomach could look more like a baby Koala hidden under his shirt.

We entered and were joined by Steve, a verten of the Pizza Place company form a year back in CO.  Having moved, he needed to be reoriented.  I was stuck in another closet with a computer to fill out paperwork I had filled out the night before, apparently it didn’t take.  Teach started side one of the Propaganda reel and let it play.  I gave up my social security number again and again.

While I believe knowin how the company started is a nice little history lesson and something I could tell customers as a stall, I really…don’t…care.  So, we watched the video again while filling out test forms based on stuff we read and things we hadn’t read or would go over in class.  Sounds crazy right? Well, it is.  But with a multiple choice test how bad can you do?

That’s not the set up of a joke or anything, it just wasn’t a hard test.

The Teacher played the video again.  Making it three times in total I got the instructions on the Company Cheer from a man in, get this, a tiny office and a handy cam. Oh, how I aspire to have one of my own.  We were also treated to the Indian (like, from India) and Japaneese comercials for the cmopany.  I can’t get them out of my head.  Much more sining, dancing, and accordian playing over seas.

Things got all strange and serious during a video about stealing from the company.  Apparently pizza theft is rampant in this county and it’s up to me to stop.  Right up there with drug use and forrest fires on my list of responsibilities. 

Teach begins going into the briefest forms of presentation, Scene: images flashing by on a shoddy screen, quick shots of powerpoints, pizza, logos ala the Ludavico Technique.  He basically clicks as fast as he can talk and points out anything that’s an answer on a test, I get the feeling I won’t always have people doing my work for me but I’ll ride it while I can.

At this point, Teach and Bob have begun vieing for spotlight in the  ”oldman with the most stories” competition.  Teach is being kind and letting him finish, which takes about 15 min. per story, at the end of which we all wonder how he’s related to the guy he was talking about.  Teach doesn’t miss a beat though and navigates us back on task.

The task at had is, how I’m almost definetly gonna get robbed.  Don’t about you but I had no idea it was this big a problem.  I can’t have more than a Jacksone on me, including my own money or I run the risk of being terminated.  We covered the basics of robbery, what it would look like, what to do, and just as I got the feeling we were gonna be role playing these situations in a bit, we moved on.

We shifted modes from fear mongering to good old begging for money.  The company has a big thing where they take a lil cash out of your paycheck and pay it into a fund that helps employees in need. (Had to be synical about something that nice).  So I decide to donate 0, I need all the cash I can get from this job to make rent.  And walk out feeling dazed, used, and quiet robable.

Next…I get an audio tour.

How this all got started

So I’m poor right? (right), and I live in the Twin Cities.  My interests include writing and acting.  This fits right in with being poor. Unfortunately I enjoy eating as well and that brings up a conflict.  I can only assume I was drawn to work at a local pizza place because of how utterly absurd it is.  It’s as if God himself said “Aw snap, this is some strange shit goin down…Someone’s gotta see this,” 

So, get this shit…

The hiring process was atrocious. Essentially it was me applying online and receiving a promising phone call about 3 weeks after…almost long enough to have forgotten entirely what it was I applied for.  So I’m  all set to call it quits and move back home but the Pizza Place called Scene: Paramedics giving CPR to some nearly dead Hope. All “Hang in there buddy! It’s gonna be okay!” Meanwhile Hope is all strung out on cheap vodka and dry macaroni.  Bastards 

On the day of the interview I walk in all professional, greeted by grim faces on the other side of the counter, save one.  The Boss.  The Boss pulls me into his office and starts the chat.  I use the word office in the same sense as I used the word fort when I was 5.  This place is about the size of a broom closet, partially occupied by a large desk, a file cabinet, and some actual brooms. 

We get past the standard intros, the names and places of origin and falsely excited exchange of “Oh yeah, I know where that is.” The Boss is young, maybe mid thirties at the oldest, and desperately in need of a friend.  At this point I’m thinking he has his eye set on me.  As we’re going along sharing forced laughs, we arrive to the actual interview questions.  We then skip them. One of two things happened here.  Either this was a premature “jumping of the shark” (Come on, you’ve seen Happy Days) in an attempt to win me over, or this fellow knows I was lying the whole time anyhow.

Regardless, next was a rousing game of phone tag.  Admittedly there are usually two players calling each other in this game, so I suppose it was just me calling everyday for about 4 days trying to figure out what I should do now that I had been hired.  My Hope relapsed and lay dead on the floor, I decided to eat a pizza in mourning…and that store is like 5 min from my house.

I walk in having ordered online cause I’m done with calling that place, and the Boss greets me with a simple “hey”. And I’m all suddenly indignant thinking “What the hell man! I spent like 45 min with you in a broom closet and you won’t even return my phone calls? Now it’s like we haven’t even met?”  However, recognition washes over him and he calls me back to his office…my pizza sit on the heat rack.

More chatting and friendly banter later I learn that the email was down.  Oh noes…not the e-mail.  There is no other reasonable form of communication in the world of Pizza People apparently.  So he begins sending e-mails and looking in files for something I should have received about a week ago and filled out already so I could attend Pizza Class the following Saturday, narrating himself the whole time.  Thankfully I have the perfect seat to watch this from, the only other chair that fits in his office.  My stomach growls.

He asks if my car is here for inspection as I will be delivering, and thanks to the copious amount of ice, snow, and subsequent dumbs moves based on those first two in Minnesota I have knocked off my side-view mirror.  A dangling side-view mirror is like a tramp stamp for a car, a mark of expected personality.  I asked if it could be delayed until I had a chance to fix it.  “No prob” says the Boss…I can only assume it’s cause we’re such good buds.

So, after much hassle I filled out the last of my online paperwork and attended class…