My boss, Don, recently sent me out on a delivery that was well out of our delivery area. I guess the customer had somehow made it through the order taking process without being properly vetted, and instead of Don making the executive decision to just call the customer back and politely informing them about their unfortunate location, he just decided to send me out to deliver it. What's even worse was that it was a Friday night, so there were phones ringing, drivers coming and going, and cooks frantically running around like a coked up cast of The Real World (also known as just The Real World). That means no one could hear me bitch about the injustice of having to take an order for a single pepperoni pizza with breadsticks to the mystic beyonds. (My whining needs to be heard!) It also meant that I was going to lose about $10 to $30 dollars by being stuck on the road for an hour when I could be back at the store getting runs to housing projects within the boundaries of our zip code.
I may be exaggerating a bit, well, at least I thought I was. That's before I had to drive up a mountain that resembled Devil's Tower on what was essentially a fire road. I literally bottomed out three times trying to get to this ladies house. Worse yet, I had to call her for directions four times because the paths became so jumbled and unmarked that I was actually unsure if I was still on a road.
When I finally got to the house, a Pit Bull bounded towards me while a a shirtless hillbilly that resembled half the cast of Winter's Bone yelled, "I think you're a little lost, boy." I just nodded in agreement and went to get back in my car when a female voice interjected and told me to hold on. Apparently John Hawkes' wife had placed an order without her husband's full knowledge (that's two Winter's Bone references for those keeping count). I then walked back to the Quonset turned house and was told, "I can't believe you guys deliver all the way out here." followed by an even more emphatic, "I really can't believe you found us!" Instead of clubbing the bitch with the business end of my heatwave bag, I simply nodded and said, "Yeah, about that, you're actually out of our delivery area. We just didn't realize this street was out here until it was too late." The woman just nodded, paid me, and I'm sure tried to place another half dozen orders to same house over the course of the next few weeks. That's just what people do. If they get a bonus that they shouldn't have, they generally try to manipulate the system to try and get their undeserved reward in perpetuity.
The woman was nice enough throughout this entire process. I just have to wonder why someone would order for delivery when they know that they live a fuck-of-a-long way away from the store and when they're fully aware that their house is next to impossible to locate. When your smartphone's GPS tries to tell you that you should just be merciful and drop it in a half-gallon jug of Fireball and that the best way to reach your destination is to fly like a crow until you reach the corona of the sun, then you should probably hesitate before conning the sophomore with the 1.6 GPA into sending the unacceptable order through. That would actually involve worrying about others, though. We wouldn't want to go down that slippery slope of affection and goodwill, now would we?
