Much Ado About Nothing

I'm going to start to answer random low-brow sociological questions in my weekly write-up about terribleness. It'll be my way of staying on target and hitting my point home without going way too far off the rails. I mean, there will still be tangents aplenty, but at least it'll increase the likelihood of there being a purpose injected into my mindless diatribes. Plus, it's about time I answered the obnoxious questions that my friends, family and email pepper me with. 

Why should it matter if I'm nice to someone that makes eight dollars an hour?

Because there's an easy way to get ahead in life. It's called being pleasant. Don't get me wrong, you definitely don't need to go out of your way to over-saturate those around you with mindless amounts of gut-wrenchingly fake geniality. No one needs your empty platitudes. We also don't need your terrible attitude either. There's a perfectly reasonable middle ground. It's situated right above telling me to go stick my dick in a light socket and right below enlightening me on how God loves me. I don't think I'm being all that picky here. Castrating me and blessing me leaves plenty of room for a pretty big middle ground.
 
Seriously, just try out my cordial code of conduct and I guarantee you'll see instant results. Want to get ahead at the work place? Just say good morning, please and thank you to every cubical slave that's within shouting distance. I think you'll be surprised at how many monitor fatigued, quasi-bleeding eyes will gaze up at you in wonderment and appreciation and return a similar token of kindness. What's that you say? You don't have an office job? That's okay. The same sort of kindhearted approach to life will benefit you whether you're the dude stuck manning the fry cooker at the big MCD, or whether you're wearing a cod piece and performing as the bottom strong man in Cirque du Soleil. Honestly, it's probably better you don't work an office job anyway. Who wants to work at a place that's severance package includes an empty 401K that you'll never live to see because the MSG in your company's food court will cause your heart to erupt like an active Krakatoa? That's if you're lucky enough to live that long, too. I know if I was stuck in a cubicle all day I'd be swinging from a window sill at the end of a Windsor Knot before the second pay period passed.
 
I'm not talking about saying sweet things to just the co-workers and bosses that you're fond of either. For maximum effectiveness, and in an attempt to achieve an impossibly beautiful utopic society, you should include everybody in this verbal love making process. I'm even talking about that sloth in co-worker's clothing that no one can stand. You know, that one guy that never stops talking about how electronic dance music isn't a genre of music, but how it's a way of life. These guys can also be identified by their hipster mustaches and their ability to weave the movie Blackfish into every conversation that has the words "zoo" or "aquarium" in it. Generally speaking, they're the breed of cat that really make you and your co-workers want to chug shots of butane and chase it with a flaming sword. Same goes for whoever your boss might be. Whether he's the brand of boss that just sits in his office all day playing Candy Crush, or whether he's the kind that bluntly accuses you of being illiterate in front of the rest of the staff (actually happened), just be nice. Same goes for the family members that you wish were aborted in their 52nd trimester. Ditto for the acquaintances that your girlfriend forces you to associate with that have the Joakim Noah man-bun haircut and only want to talk about the Premier Soccer League. But most importantly, just be nice to the people who serve you and are just doing their job. The baristas, waiters, hostesses, IT technicians, telemarketers and delivery drivers of the world aren't intentionally trying to throw you into a Caitlyn Jenner-type of midlife crisis. We're merely trying to make it through the massive disappointment that is our lives with money for rent and a little extra for a Netflix subscription that will help us escape the reality of our reefer smoking, minimum wage making existence. Plus, being pleasant to the bottom rung of the work world is highly beneficial. Not because being bright and sunshiny helps us, but because it makes us not want to destroy you and your misguided determination. I remember, one time we got a call for delivery that ended up failing spectacularly. By that I mean one of our drivers went to a house that was on the edge of our delivery area about six miles away (12 miles round trip). When the driver arrived on site they knocked, honked and called and no one ever answered the door. Naturally, this meant that the driver came back with the pizza and nothing else to show for his time but a half gallon less of 87 octane. Fast forward about an hour and you have the very same customer calling back and demanding to know where his food was at. As you can probably predict, he did the less than menschy move that every angry patron does; he demanded to talk to a manager.
 
On a side note, people, this tactic never works. For the most part, managers are the same age or younger than the staff member that was initially helping you. The only reason they're managers is because they're either blowing the GM or they have the uncanny ability to disparage the peons around them into being productive by channeling the hate that they have for the hell that is their life. That means us grunts desperately don't want to deal with what will inevitably be a pissed off GED-less grump that's on a perpetual PMS-like power trip. In other words, we'll be more than willing to work with you to avoid that unhelpful handoff of the phone that we definitely don't want to make . Also, you have to factor in that the bosses want to watch the bottom line in an effort to earn bonuses and store profit. Meanwhile, the grunts of the world could give a shit less about the loss of a single order. That means we'll sweeten the deal for you if you speak to us like we have a soul and like we're competent enough to correct your complaint. Just don't treat us like a heroin addicted hooker and we won't treat you like the 17th John that we've given a condom covered handjob to.

Anyway, our 23 year-old Asian manager took the complaint and tried to calm the man's obviously frayed nerves. I don't know what the man was saying, but it was obviously cold-hearted enough to strike the nerves of one of our best shift runners. Seeing the struggle, I opted to take the rest of the call. I have no authority, but unfortunately I have a sac and that means I'm obligated to stick up for the fairer sex regardless of hierarchical positioning. When I grabbed the line I calmly introduced myself and asked what the problem was. A deep southern drawl slowly said, "I ordered a pizza from you, where is at?" In a very collected tone I informed the man  that a driver had already delivered the order and that no one wound up being home. He then hit me with a, "I was feeding ma horses, so I didn't know you were here." First off, my bad. I'm sorry you ordered from us and we inconveniently showed up when we said we would. We should have known you'd be tending to your duties as a ranch hand instead of expecting the pizza order that you placed. Our bad. It was busy at the store at the time, so I calmly and coolly informed the man that we would have his pizza waiting for him at the store for him to pick up but that we couldn't spare sending out another driver. The man then shouted, "Listen here, son. You grab my pizza, get your ass in your car and bring me my fucking pizza." I just said, "I'm going to hang up now, sir. Have a good night." What else was he expecting as a response? Was he expecting me to say "Yessa, Massa. By the way, your order's been comped and we're sending out our Asian associate for a happy ending and a complimentary soapy." Because he should have expected a dial tone before the hate passed his lips. That kind of attitude almost always earned an empty line. Now, you know how things could have gone differently here? If he would have apologized for not being home and not reamed our Sushi loving shift runner. A simple request for a re-delivery followed by a few words acknowledging he made a mistake would have been all it would have taken. We honestly don't mind mending mistakes. Yours or ours. We simply want a civilized conversation. Don't take this out of context either. It's not like I need the customer to drop to their knees and plead at the altar of Wayne for a boon that may earn them their bacon flavored cheesy bread. Just a quick and honest, "Sorry about that. Any chance I could get my order re-delivered?" Boom. It's that easy. That's why it's surprising that only one in about ten complaints goes in that direction.

I'm not trying to force people to use fake courtesies as a way to extort people out of their orders either. Actually, I am. This is for the betterment of you and me. If you want Verizon to slash that overage charge that you racked up while re-watching the Youtube video about the baby squirrel being adopted by the mother cat, just add a "Please" or a "Is there any chance...?" to your phone call. Seriously, if you want that Denny's Grand Slam comped because your ham was so raw it scurried off your plate to look for truffles, just grind out that smile, choke out the words "thank you" and see the glory that is gratitude play out before your very eyes. We don't want to deal with you and you don't want to deal with us, so let's just power our way through the active bitch face that you're directing my way. Trust me when I say that if you do this, everyone's stay on this big beautiful blue ball of terra firma will be that much better for it.

Don't Be A Menace

I recently brought up how a deaf customer decided to gloss over the payment part of a delivery and then proceeded to not answer the door or phone when the driver tried to get her to pay the rest of her tab. Her move could have been accidental in that she simply miscounted. I find that scenario highly unlikely, though. I mean, it's not like she was blind. She just couldn't hear. I mean, a five dollar bill looks like a five dollar bill regardless of whether or not you can hear the nails on a chalkboard that is the tone of my nasally voice. (Actually, a more appropriate analogy for the tone of my voice might be a steak knife to the side of a bottle of wine. You see, a study in the Journal of Neuroscience came to the conclusion that nails on a chalk board is only the third most annoying noise in the world. First is a knife being drawn across glass and I'm pretty sure second's my nasally drone, or it's a fork on a sheet of glass, I can't remember which. Kind of the same thing, though.)

Anyway, the other option for our frugal and hearing impaired friend was that her skimping out on the full tab was deliberate and that her not answering the door or her phone was purposeful and not a legitimate product of her disorder. If I were to make an educated guess, I'd say that the move was intentional, because contrary to popular belief, being handicapped doesn't eliminate you from being awful. In fact, I'd argue that those that have met with misfortune can more easily justify their illicit activities due to the fact that they're down on their luck. I know if I lost a limb in a messy moped accident I'd lord my lost leg over people that had all their limbs every goddamn day. I'd weave my tale of sorrow into every second sentence. That's just because I'm a terrible human being, though. Not all those that meet with tragedy are that willing to sell their soul for a little sympathy. My accusations against this affected customer are all a matter of opinion, though. What's not an opinion is how many times I've hung up on the hearing impaired. That would be a cool half-dozen times. It's never a purposeful move out of spite or anything. It's not like I harbor hatred for the cochlear-less. It's more like I abhor the series of clicks that rapidly fire into the phone when they call in to place an order for pizza. It's kind of strange that I never actually took the time to think about how the deaf manage to make phone calls. It's one of those everyday tasks that you sort of overlook and take for granted. Well, after ten years I can now proudly say that I now know how they officially make their calls. Once you answer the phone, there's a sequence of long silence in the connection followed by a string of beeps and boops that sound like the space shuttle Columbia is reassembling itself and gearing up to re-implode, then the noises temporarily take a break before launching into what sounds like the keyboardist from Four Year Strong getting liquored up, breaking into Loveline studios and indiscriminately mashing buttons on the board op's soundboard. My first experience with these calls ended up with three consecutive hangups followed by a fourth call in which Stephen Hawking's synthesized voice robotically told me, "Please, do not hang up on me. I am hearing impaired." Talk about feeling like an asshole. It was a truly desperate sounding plea, which is odd considering the voice sounded like a Down Syndrome version of Siri that's been sucking straight off a tank of helium. I've got to give some serious credit to the programmer that recorded and coded that pre-rendered voice and still managed to make the emotionally autistic wonder that is me feel for the person.

This unfortunate occurrence sadly happened about a dozen additional times over the course of the next few weeks. I'm assuming our eardrum impaired fan just decided to abandon our hopeless enterprise after we simply weren't getting it. I'm guessing they just got fed up with the accidental hangups. It's not like we were being discriminatory or anything. I mean, it's not like we could tell if they were black or gay over the phone, so obviously we weren't cutting the call short on purpose.

Regardless of why the hang ups happened, just know that 100% of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the shitheads who routinely prank called our store. With how many times I've been hit with a soundboard imitation of Stewie from Family Guy telling me how he's hard, I've been somewhat conditioned to hang up during the dead air that exists in a conversation or when a series of wacky noises randomly starts firing off. It's how I protect my self-esteem from the callous and cruel high school freshmen that call in and talk about their honker and how they want their delivery driver to pin pepperonis to their nipples and call them cowboy. 

If you missed it, the moral of this story is that deaf people are con artists that shouldn't waste our time with their Morse Code phone calls. Capiche? Just kidding. Just be patient with us. We're not trying to hang up on you. It's just that you're statistically one out of every 500 people. And unfortunately it's the other 499 hearing unimpaired folks that make us want to hang ourselves with our aprons, so just give us a chance or two. I guarantee we'll get you your pizza if you promise to pay us full price for your food. Fair?        

Lost In Translation

I'm going to continue my all encompassing morally led charge to enlighten the masses with another bit of brilliance that I've grown fond of calling Wayne's Wisdom. 

I'll start with how I personally acquired this particularly potent bit of insight. It starts with me taking out the trash for the local pizzeria that I work for. You see, after a long shift of being run through the sausage grinder that is a delivery driver's life, I would have to do mundane chores. It's truly appalling that they would torture us so. I mean, I've spent a long hard day sitting on my ass listening to book one through seven in the Harry Potter series and earning tips for it, and now they expect me to do dishes, sweep and mop? It's bullshit. Dumbledore just died and I only received a 7% gratuity on my last run and now they expect me to perform multiple menial services? What kind of cruel world is this? I need time to cope. Plus, the plaque in my heart doesn't take kindly to physical activity. Sitting for six hours a day in my air conditioned car has hurt my heart's ability to push the congealed grease that's masquerading as blood through my ticker's piping. I'm convinced that the more I strain myself the sooner I'll need an arterial roto-rooting. I'm pretty positive that lethargy is the only thing that keeps the biological Jenga blocks that are my inner workings from crumbling like my self-esteem after sex. 

I guess these days bosses actually expect you to earn your paycheck. Damn competitive job market and overachievers making me look lazy. Luckily for me, I just pounded a pint of Ultra Black Rehab flavored Monster (actually a flavor - sad, right?). It was making me a bit dizzy, but this energy drink equivalent of liquid courage that amounts to about a rail-and-a-half of uncut cocaine helped me push through the more challenging parts of backpacking out the trash to the dumpster that was situated an inhumane 18 steps from the store's front door.

When I was a step or two away from the dumpster I noticed a homeless man digging through the contents of the receptacle. I don't usually go around assuming people are hobos. I'm just saying that when you look like a member of ZZ Top that's spent a Summer rooting around in a Taco Bell grease trap and you smell like you routinely sleep with someone sitting on your face, then I think it's safe to say that you can assume that there's some homelessness in the equation. The giant bag full of recycling and rifling through an unsealed industrial dumpster is sort of a tell, too.

While I was walking the forty pounds of filth out I realized that I was going to be tossing a bag of barf worthy waste right in front of my filthy friend. People always talk about the dehumanization of the homeless, so I thought I'd listen to my idiotic idealistic friends and spark up a genial conversation. I approached the man that I'm sure had mange and unloaded a new trove of treasures into the dumpster for him to scour through. I then courteously said, "Hey, how's it going?" just to break the ice. The grungy old grandpa responded with a shake of his head and a gruff, "What do you think? Not too fucking good." I guess that one's on me. I could have just done what the rest of society does and simply ignored the street urchin. Sure, I could have probably taken a better approach or asked a more tactful question. I mean, I sort asked to be snapped at when I'm asking for a status update from a guy that's semi-naked and digging for nickels when the moon's at its apex. Still, it doesn't mean he couldn't have stopped talking to himself, quieted the seven voices rattling around is his skull and said, "Been better, but thanks for asking." I'm not asking for the homeless to don a top hat and break out in an improvisational version of "Dancing In The Rain." I was just hoping to avoid startling the man so I wouldn't inadvertently get shivved with the bone of a half-eaten pork chop. I was also trying to be a human being and have a shallow conversation with a man that society pressured me into talking to in the first place. The man probably should have been committed and yet according to the tree hugging hippies of the world it's our collectively unprofessional responsibility to interact and empathize with these potentially dangerous people. 

Okay, so I'll admit that this incident is definitely on me. That's the wisdom, though. Don't talk to transients. It'll never go the way you're anticipating. Plus, I'm pretty sure interacting with them will make your children autistic. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that I read that in last month's copy of Popular Science.

Simply put, don't ask stupid questions. I asked an atrociously awful question and I got the blunt answer I justly deserved.

Deliver Us From Evil

Here's another entry in the always vitriolic and occasionally useful write-up known as Wayne's Wisdom:

If you receive a call from a strange number minutes after you order a pizza for delivery, pick it up. It's your lost delivery driver that you forgot to turn a light on for. Well, usually the call is about the lack of light. Other reasons why we can't find your home might be because you give terrible directions to our insiders or because the city planner decided to randomly put an 1100 block address next to a 200 block just to ruin the lives of UPS and pizza delivery drivers everywhere. That's not the end of my incessantly whiny wisdom, though. I want to throw out a few more insufferable experiences that I've routinely run into with the idea that hopefully you can take a little something away from them. Maybe you could use my pain and suffering as a way to course correct before I decide to decompress by drinking a decanter worth of Drano.

-Don't tell your driver "tough shit." No one necessarily said that to me verbatim, but on a recent delivery I called a customer sometime around midnight. I told the girl that answered the phone that I was outside of her or her neighbor's house but that I couldn't tell which because both the houses didn't have visible addresses or lights that were turned on. Her response? Laughing followed by a, "Well, I can't help you there," followed by more laughing. Is that really the proper response? Shouldn't she have said, "Oh, sorry. I'll turn a porch light on for you." Instead I flipped a coin, picked a house and luckily chose correctly. Now, what do you suppose happened when I got to the front door and knocked? She turned on the porch light! I guess the journey to the light switch was far too exhausting without the hot dog infused crust waiting for her at the end of the immensely challenging eight step endeavor to the door that she could have made 18 seconds earlier. Totally understandable, though. I only remove my rectum from my recliner when I'm guaranteed a slab of dough that looks like it was raped by one of Oscar Mayer's wieners. Truthfully, her inaction made all the sense in the world when she answered the door. You see, she was smoking hot. In fact, she was even doing that hot chick move where she was wearing a shirt that barely hung down past her hips. It's that move that makes you question whether or not undergarments are even in the equation. I guess I could have held the pizzas over my head and made her reach for them to really confirm my suspicions. I do believe a slight show for my struggles would have certainly been a reasonable bit of recourse, but instead of acting like a junior-high drop out turned pedophile, I chose to take the mature rout and left my love of lowbrow humor to my imagination. This is exactly what I'm talking about, though. I've already become distracted by the allure of her uncovered ass and I'm simply writing about it. I should still be pissed by the apathy she directed towards my porch light-less plight. Instead, I'm giving her a pass because she was worth beating off to. What a terribly fucked up world we live in, right? I mean, I still hate her for not being able to apply some common sense to a stupidly small situation, but society and I are willing to look beyond the bitchiness and give her an all encompassing Disneyland-like fast pass to the front of the lackadaisical line for being enticing enough to want to plow. It's just tragic that we're that aesthetically oriented. With that being said, ugly people, turn on your fucking porch light. It's midnight, we don't want to get shot by your redneck neighbors and you don't want us to trip over your lawn gnome and impale ourselves on a rusty rake, because the lawsuit and the lack of pizza would be a serious downer to what was probably a delightful night of drunkenness. And those of you that were blessed with Kim Kardashian-like curves, enjoy it while it lasts. A decade from now you and your get-out-of-hot-water hotness card will expire. At that point you'll just be forgettable, rude and a distant beat-off memory in the hippocampus of a handful of your old high school chums that used to have a hankering for the hotness that you had going on..
 
-When giving out directions, please don't spell out the name of the street or use landmarks to guide us. Give us a crossroad and whether or not your the third or fourth house on the left. Telling us that you live in the house with the palm trees in the front yard doesn't help. I actually had a customer tell me that once. I mean, that little nugget of knowledge may have helped if I lived in Lincoln, Nebraska, since I sincerely doubt that the words "palm trees" have ever crossed the lips of a native Corn Husker. The problem is that this is California. We regularly compete with Florida and the Virgin Islands for the landmass with the most palm trees. And seriously, don't spell the name of your street for me. I asked for directions one time and a customer start spelling the name of the street. The guy wasn't trying to be condescending or amusing either. He genuinely thought that they were doing me a solid. I immediately and somewhat harshly told the man, "Directions, not spelling." Naturally, my statement was met by silence and a complete inability to properly direct me in any useful way, which brings me to my last bit of advice:

-Learn where you live. I totally understand not knowing your address because you're visiting a friend and ordering a pizza. Actually, no, I don't get that. Who goes to a friend's house and orders anything? Shouldn't you leave that up to the head of the household? They obviously invited you over, shouldn't they be responsible for the food that flows through their own home? Regardless of who orders food or where it was ordered from, nobody in this iPhone driven age seems to have the ability to dole out comprehensible directions. Whenever I would make the mistake of inquiring about a particularly puzzling run, I'd be met with an unintelligible grunt or a question about what a crossroad actually is. I'd then be handed off to six different people over the course of the next seven minutes until everyone at the home concluded that they can't actually explain where they're located. You would think that with the combined might of an ant colony worth of morons that there would be one soul with some smarts and a slight inkling about how they got where they're currently at. Nope. As it turns out, everyone born after Vietnam is directionally daft and completely self-reliant on technology that they don't fully comprehend.

Seriously, what would all these people do without their smartphones? Would they just walk in circles around their coffee table or repeatedly smash headfirst into their front door until CTE finally claimed them? Please, for the welfare of all the innocent bystanders that are led into your life, just put down your phone for four seconds and hash out the details on how to get to your home without using GPS. I'm convinced that this is ultimately how the Russians will win the next Cold War that we're gearing up for. They'll just knock down our satellites, no one will be able to find their way home or to work, our economy will melt like Joan Rivers' face and we'll all starve to death while aimlessly wandering around the confines of our Google Map-less backyard. 

These are just a couple of the more common place directionally deranged quirks that patrons pass my way. I have a ton more chambered for another tyrannical tangent. For now, just try to hammer down where you live and how to get there. If you do just that little bit of charitable work, it'll be the beginning of the best day of your delivery driver's life. There will also be some self-satisfaction in knowing that you might be able to successfully find the way to your own kitchen if you make the mistake of breaking the boundaries of your master bedroom without the team of Apple engineers that are riding along in your front pocket. 

Snatch

People never seem to want to point out the positive side of being handicapped. I know that may seem counter-intuitive, but there is a bright side to certain afflictions. Take being deaf for example; these impaired individuals have crafted a whole culture and community around their disadvantaged state. I'm not overstating this either. My boss's wife teaches American Sign Language, and according to the numerous friends and acquaintances that she's made in the deaf community over the years, they don't see their inability to hear as being a disorder. They see it as merely being different. That's a hell-of-a-way to look at what many perceive to be an unfortunate set of circumstances. 

I can somewhat see what the deaf community means. It does seem advantageous in certain scenarios. I just never fully grasped that ordering pizza would be one of those many scenarios. You see, one day, our store received an internet order from a random woman that lived in a fairly rundown apartment complex. (If you haven't picked up on the nuances of the life of a delivery driver by now, you never will. This is sort of the story of our lives. We risk taking food to customers that may or may not be armed and dangerous, live off of EBT and spend their welfare checks on food that will cause gout and lead to type III diabetes. I don't know how scientifically accurate I'm being, but I'm pretty sure that after you've consumed a grain silo worth of pizza dough you'll simply generate a third form of diabetes. I'm pretty sure it's the kind where your pancreas simply packs up it's bags, grabs the appendix and fires out your ass in one last attempt at freedom.)

Anyway, an internet order was placed, a pizza was sent out to a random apartment dwelling dame, and the woman successfully received it. She was actually waiting outside to pay, said thank you and then headed back inside. And as with most successful orders, the driver wandered back to his car and counted the money he was given. That's when it dawned on him that he was a few dollars short. Usually this isn't a big deal. Sometimes customers miscount. It happens. Every third time I deposit cash at the bank I come up short or heavy. It just comes with the coke stained, tag covered cash territory. It's tremendously easy to get distracted and miss a bill or two when you're dealing with fully ripped and twice taped two dollar bills that were picked up by copper stealing tweakers at the local recycling plant. Then there seems to be an assortment of meth addicts that use their collection of magic markers to simply deface every last one of their dollars. When you think about, it's kind of scary that every third bill has been partially tagged and fully molested. Who really are these abusers of bills? Who honestly sits down and gang tags singles? I mean, have gang-bangers really used up all the available canvas out there? Is the only option left to start etching an iron cross into Mr. Washington's wig while painting a set of SS bolts on Lincoln's brow? The side of shipping trucks, trains and bridge overpasses not an enticing enough canvas for their criminal activities anymore? Seriously, knock it the fuck off. It's called a $20 dollar community college art class or a Highlights Magazine. Try it some time.

Also, if you're wondering why drivers generally don't count their money before the customer leaves, it's because it's rude. Assuming people are honest is the best way to land a large tip. Meanwhile, betting that you're getting shortchanged and nonchalantly flipping through those singles is a guaranteed way to get a complaint and a big fat stiff. Plus, we know where you live. If you short change us, we can simply call you and/or walk back up to your door and ask for the rest of our money. And that's exactly what our driver did. He calmly walked back up to the apartment door, knocked and never received a response. He even increased the violence of the pounding until he realized he wasn't going to get an answer. The driver then went over to look in the window to see if maybe he could flag the lady down. To his surprise, he could see the woman. She was standing about ten paces away from the door triumphantly eating a slice of pizza. The driver began frantically waving to try to catch the woman's attention. Shortly thereafter he began pounding on the glass. Still, nary a response. You can imagine what was running through our driver's mind at the time. He had to have thought that he was clearly being ignored and shortchanged by a middle-aged lady that was victoriously consuming her stolen prize right in front of his under-paid eyes. At this point, our driver did the only thing left at his disposal. He called the customer. The phone rang once then cut straight to a voicemail that said in a professional tone, "The person you are calling is hearing impaired. Please don't leave a message. They will not get back to you." It wasn't a joke either. It was an automated messaging system designed for the deaf. The "will not call you back" part seemed to be a personal touch, though.

Thus ends our story about how deaf people can get away with shit that the audibly-able never could. Partially paying people is just one of the perks, though. I mean, how awesome would it be to be able to ignore loved ones, join a bowling league for the deaf, never having to talk on the phone and being fortunate enough to have full-blown universities and schools operate solely for the benefit of you and your damaged kin. It seems like the unimpaired majority of the population are the ones that are really getting gamed here. I'm guessing we can't focus on improving ourselves as much because there are roughly 200 million so-called "healthy" humans in the US. That's far too many fuck-ups to try and zero in on. Meanwhile, there are only a million deaf people; making it a much easier problem to tackle from a scale standpoint. Just think about all the revenue that could be generated if the entire 1,000,000 person population decided to Jew drivers out of three dollars like this one did. That's about two million free slices of pizza in addition to three million dollars in pity money we'll never see again. These deaf fast food fans are like some sort of obese group of Robin Hoods that steal from the poor and give to themselves but can't enjoy the dulcet tones of Ke$ha or the lyrical brilliance of 'I Luv Dem Strippers' by 2 Chainz. 

Groundhog Day

Why is it that customers that tip well and treat you like you should be allowed to drink out of the same water fountain as them only order once every leap year, meanwhile, drunken fiends that want to humiliate you to make themselves feel better about their inevitable heart disease and the fact that no one loves them routinely place orders after midnight on every day of the week that ends in 'Y'? Is it because life has a rationing plan of pleasure? Is there a finite amount of happiness that would run out like potable water in California? Apparently, because about once every three months I would find myself delivering to a full-blown mcmansion that sported two Lambo's, a Ferrari, a hummer and a full sized sail boat that was set afloat in an infinity edge pool (not a joke). The way too young owner of this estate would always answer the door wearing cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and tip me somewhere between an Alexander Hamilton and an Andrew Jackson. Then on the opposite end of the awesome spectrum there was this drunken forty year-old dude that would call in more than once a week and rudely ramble on about wanting wings with marinara sauce before ultimately calling us something obscene and hanging up on us before we could respond.
 
Just as a heads up, I don't mind you knowing what you want to order. I love the fact that you have your heart set on a specific item and that you hashed out the finer details of your order before you called in. I don't want to up-sell you a bunch of shit that nobody ever wants (Coke Zero and salads), and you probably don't want to hear me bombard you with options about shit that you wouldn't ever willingly let through your front door without a vegetarian girlfriend that's already agreed to blow you for them. Also, I get the Coke Zero, too. You're obviously going to use it to poison your neighbor's lawn and then mix the remainder of it in with a handle of Jäger. I'm not 100% sure, but in my very unscientific opinion those are the only two beneficial uses for the syrup-less shite. I'm serious here. Does anybody ever go, "I really have a hankering for some leafy greens with my meat lover's pizza?" And Coke, way to really hit the mark with your branding, because Zero is the exact number of people that want to wash down their extra large order of breadsticks with a soda that tastes like used windshield wiper fluid. Honestly, I don't think I'm alone here when I say that if I truly wanted a zero calorie soda, I'd knock back a diet coke. I wouldn't hone in on a drink that tasted like watered down hand sanitizer. Also, who the hell eats marinara sauce with their bone-in wings? We couldn't even enter it into our computer because the request was so off the wall. I mean, I'm no gastroenterologist, but is tomato paste and hot sauce the only thing you can taste when your liver starts to fail? I have a somewhat savvy suggestion for other alcoholics out there that enjoy this same culinary quirk. It's called order a pizza. It comes with marinara sauce and it goes fucking fantastically with wings, try it some time.

Anyway, this middle-aged alcoholic that I was forced to frequently deliver to lived on a dirt road that had so many one to two foot rocks embedded into the path that it was nearly impossible to traverse without tearing your oil well off. I remember my first time heading there I was struggling to make the TDS worthy journey despite driving my mom's Ford Ranger. (God it's a sad existence isn't it? The fact that I had to borrow my mom's truck to deliver pizzas is so shameful. If I was born into a prouder culture I would have fallen onto a rusty pizza cutter seppuku-style many years ago, or if I was Jewish I would've eaten enough fermented gefilte fish to put me into an unsurvivable sepsis filled coma. I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's how Japanese and Jewish cultures express their shame.) Well, about halfway down the roadway the dirt path smoothed out a bit. By the time I hit the customer's hundred foot long dirt driveway the trail seemed almost graded. The run got even better when I noticed that what looked like a husband and wife couple appeared to be sitting in lawn chairs in front of their garage. I remember thinking to myself that these people really had their shit together. Despite being a little drunk on the phone, they knew what they wanted and they were waiting outside to pay. That's about the time the truck I was driving crashed into a four foot deep ditch that ran across the entire width of the driveway. Apparently they were installing some sort of sewer line or piping and they just didn't deem it necessary to tell me when I was careening towards it. A simple hand gesture telling me to stop was all it would have taken to avoid having me take a nose dive into my new-found, neck deep, nightmare.  Instead of doing me that solid, though, they just sat on their asses, sipping their scotch and watched as I hilariously high centered myself. You might say that not noticing the ditch is my fault. It might be, too. My only defense is that I was focusing on the customers in the driveway and not actively looking for dangerous divots that were cloaked underneath the darkening sky. Also, you sort of expect a driveway to be drivable, as the name sort of suggests. 

After a few awkward minutes of watching me ineffectively spinning my tires, the male customer got up with his drink in tow and just lifelessly stared at my still stuck truck. The man didn't even apologize. He just stood their taking the occasional hit off of his home brew while watching me struggle. After a few more minutes of them staring at my immobility the man asked me if I had AAA. I told him I didn't and then in a super frustrated tone asked the question I had been dying to ask since I initially got stuck, "Why didn't you wave at me so I'd know to stop. I could have avoided driving into that ditch. I mean, I was looking right at you." He just shrugged his shoulders and that was that. I instantly added that answer to my mile long manifesto that's filled with wildly unsatisfying responses to almost inconceivably easy to answer questions. I wasn't asking for them to beg or plead for forgiveness. I just want an honest response. A, "I guess I should have thought about the fact that we called for delivery. I mean, we should have foreseen that you might drive into the camouflaged cavern that exists in our entryway. It is odd that all I did was mindlessly watch you wreck your Ranger. Sorry about that." Nobody ever does that, though. When you catch someone stealing, cheating, anything. It's always a shrug of the shoulders followed by an "I don't know." That's if you even get that much out of a person. Why people, why? 

I've got to give a little credit to the husband. though. At least he got up off his ass to soullessly stare at me being stuck. The wife was still sitting in the lawn chair looking uninterested. After a few beats I frustratingly removed my hands from my head to keep my skull from imploding like I was sucking on an Iraqi IED blowpop. I then looked at the tractor that the man had parked in his back yard and asked him if he could at least pull me out. His response? A sigh followed by a slow trot that looked more like he was walking the green mile to the hangman's noose than helping a delivery driver that he helped dick over. I was pulled free about a half hour later with nary an apology for the trench that my truck took on head first. I don't think I need to bring up how much dinero I pulled down on the gratuity either. I'm sure you can make the educated guess that it was more than nothing but less than the work that my mom's suspension needed.

Luckily for everyone else, I was the first driver to head to this address. That meant I was able to enter this little nugget of knowledge into our computer system so as to permanently alert potential future victims to the invisible canal that was itching to consume a Fast and the Furious cast worth of cars. The tragedy here isn't that I had to get my tires rotated and balanced after biffing it. It's that these are the kind of customers that are the most frequent and the least philanthropic. How are we as a staff supposed to maintain our collective sanity when these kind of scenarios become common place. It's an unanswerable question that boils down to this one plea of mine. Please for the love of God buy my book or one of the 500 songs I've published at Pacific Ridge Records. Set me free.        

Road to Perdition

Maybe I should have changed the title of my book, 'Why You're a Terrible Customer' to 'Why You're a Terrible Job.' I mean, it's well known that customers survive simply to vacuum out the soul of the simple-minded and the sweet-hearted. But it's not so fully understood that delivering often times feels like you're being shoved head first into an active LHC. It's a sort of chicken or the egg type of question, though. I mean, is shuttling around food inherently abysmal? Or is it the lying, manipulative and devious consumer base that makes the job such an awful one? I know this is sort of a cop out, but I think the answer is 50/50. Besides prostitution and working at Chuck E. Cheese's, there are few jobs that rank lower on the spiritually rewarding side of life. But at the same time, there are zero jobs that harbor so many ill-tempered tool-bags that simply want to shit on anybody with a sunny disposition.
 
Let me explain what I mean here by making a poor transition to an example that makes my half-and-half philosophy seem sound. I was delivering a pizza to a house that was almost completely isolated from the community. The home was on a semi-secluded side road that was surrounded by a forest of pine trees. The nearest neighbor was about a quarter mile away from this $600,000-plus estate. Generally this is a good sign. If a house is valuable and remote, it usually means that the people have their shit together. They have these things, like, you know, jobs, families and other dream crushing responsibilities. Conversely, the lower the acreage and the more sequestered a house is, the more likely you are to end up like Ned Beatty in Deliverance. That's what made this particular delivery so peculiar. It started out like any ordinary run to any other run-of-the-mill affluent home. By that I mean I parked in the driveway, walked about 20 yards to the front door and rang the doorbell. 

Real quick, on the subject of doorbells; please stop telling me to "ring the doorbell" or "knock on the door" in the driving directions section of your online order. The comments section specifically says, "Insert driving directions here." That means if the tent that your bivouacking in is located in a hard to find gutter behind Kmart, let me know. It doesn't mean fill me in on the standard way I've been alerting people to my arrival since before I was conceived. Also, for the love of God, I'm not going to draw a picture of Slimer on your pizza box for your amusement, so please stop using the directions section as a running commentary piece for your misguided notions of humor. You're not the only customer we have, and if I had the talent to draw you a penguin on roller skates, do you think I would still be delivering pizza to you and your super baked stoner buddies? 

Anyway, when I rang the doorbell, as specified in the directions, I was quickly greeted by three guys. At least I assume that they were guys. It was a little hard to tell considering they were all wearing standard blue jeans, a white t-shirt and stockings pulled all the way over their head and face. You heard me, there were three six-foot tall gentleman with leggings covering their faces. Now, I don't know about you, but I've only witnessed this fashion choice on reality shows like Cops and in movies that involve some sort of heist followed by Denzel Washington negotiating a hostage situation. Now, there were two ways I could have gone in this situation; I could have panicked and sprinted for my car, or I could have nonchalantly carried on with the transaction as if nothing was amiss. I chose the latter. I figured that the worst that could happen is that they'd wind up stealing the pizza from me, yoinking my maxed out credit cards and holding me hostage until they realized my parents lived below the poverty line. I'm proud of the fact that I acted as if nothing was out of the ordinary. I literally didn't hesitate for even a second. I just stared into the depths of those spanx and told them the price of their pizza. It seemed like a sound and somewhat stoic choice. That is, until they failed to respond to my mention of the price and it dawned on me that they were having none of my suaveness. At this point I just embraced the fact that I was going to be known as that lonely and somewhat jaded man that simply disappeared while delivering. What a legacy. Being known as the 29 year-old that was making minimum wage and just went off the grid. My Norwegian ancestors would be proud. They discovered America while I located heart disease from too much free pizza. And the dick in the ass that I was about to get thanks to my failed flight or fight response would be the real cherry on top of that prestige parfait. 
 
A few beats after I brought up their bill, one of the three members of ISIS decided to reach into their pocket. Instead of pulling out a rusty steak knife meant for my carotid artery, the man handed me a wad of crumpled up ones. I hesitated a bit at first, but then I cautiously handed him the pizza, grabbed the cash and quickly turned around to leave. The three men never moved from where they were standing and never uttered a single word. The instant I turned my back on the threats I remembered that my car was parked about a block away. I mean, in reality that's not that far away, but do you know how distant 20 yards seems when there are three masked men standing behind you in the middle of the Cleveland Forest? I was about ten yards away from the entryway when I heard the pitter-patter of fast approaching footsteps steadily increasing in volume behind me. I just sighed and shook my head in disgust. This is where it all ended. Five free from my still running Civic.

Just as a side note, I always left my car running when I was at a house because I always ignorantly believed that homeowners were above raping and pillaging. I mean, having a mortgage means you have to have at least a modicum of responsibility, right? Plus, at houses I was usually always within eyesight of my vehicle, so there was never really any fear of it getting stolen without my knowledge. Apartments, on the other hand, are a completely different story. I would always do that move where I'd repeatedly click the lock button on my key chain until I lost sight of my car. The rest of the time I just prayed that when my car inevitably got broken into that they would go through the side window and not through the heat filament filled back window. I can handle $500 dollars, $2000 is about a thousand extra deliveries that my failing willpower wouldn't be capable of slogging through. Seriously, folks, what the fuck? I should be able to leave my car running anywhere without fear. I mean, I don't think I'm making ridiculous demands here. If you don't boost my car, I won't boost yours. But no, that saintly version of society's ship sailed long ago. Now, I just have to have a side stash of money holed away to inevitably pay my co-pay when someone does hurl a piece of granite through my front window to get to the glory that is my Samsung flip phone (yes, I still have a flip phone). Come on people, let's just try and all live in a semi-shared space and not loot from one another. In the long term you'll enjoy reaping the benefits of a peaceful community far more than you'll enjoy the razing and raiding of your neighbor's home. Trust me.

Anyway, I turned around right before the freaky footsteps were upon me and I instantly came face to face with one of the three criminals. The man was panting from the short run, standing alone and was holding his stocking in his hand. He then proceeded to apologize to me and tell me that I shouldn't call the cops. He said that they were trying to get a Youtube reaction out of me and that they just wanted to scare me a bit. The man then bribed me with five dollars and sent me on my way.

You see, this sums up the devilishness of delivering, but it also shows the entirety of the evil that is everybody I deliver to. That's why I now realize that I shit the bed when I named my novel, "Why You're a Terrible Customer." Don't get me wrong, it shouldn't have been, "Why You're a Terrible Job" either. The title clearly should have just been, "Why You're Terrible," because that's the truth. People are terrible, and this is just one of the thousands of anecdotal events that have happened to me while delivering that prove as much.    

Make Believe

I'm hitting the customer related exaggerations hard again this week. There are simply too many prefabricated proclamations that are spit out by these sub-standard charlatans to ignore, and only this shared awareness will bring an end to these drummed up yet diabolical stories. 

I was taking a pizza delivery to a road that was nearly undrivable. Actually, there were two crossroads to get to this street, and one of them was literally untraversable. There was so many rain formed divots in the road with so much perpetually moist mud caked on top of them that my Honda Civic would sink if I went to slow and it would spin out if I tried to hustle. Sadly, I figured out which way was more passable the hard way. By that I mean I was on a previous run, realized the road was too terrible and tried to conquer it anyway. Apparently taking four minutes to backtrack half a mile is way too hard. It's much more logical to realize that you probably won't make it, ignoring that rational inner monologue and trying to make the journey anyway. I've got to tell you that that line of lethargic thinking is a little harder to explain to your delivery-less customer and the AAA driver that has to slap a tow hitch onto your bumper. Lesson learned.

On this particular delivery everything went surprisingly smooth. I idled down the barely passable section of the road without incident. I mean, I slipped a disk in my back and my suspension spontaneously caught fire, but that's par for the unpaved course here in Ramona. Unsurprisingly, the house I was heading to was conveniently the last house before the road turned into what amounted to soggy hummus. Well, right before I got to my destination, I passed what had to have been a woman in her early thirties walking her dog. Actually, I guess it's not walking your dog when you're just standing in the middle of the street and simply holding a leash while staring at your phone. I'm not exaggerating when I say she was standing in the middle of the road either. She was geometrically at the epicenter of the dirt path that was masquerading as travelable terrain. I was perplexed by what she was doing, but I thought that maybe she was just unaccustomed to traffic on such a rarely traveled road. Naturally, this led to me doing the only reasonable thing I could think of doing. I just hit the gas and made a female/Fido flapjack. I just crushed the bitch under the weight of my tires. At least, mentally I did. In reality I smiled, slowed down and politely waved. I then successfully delivered my order a few houses down, drove back by the still stationary woman, waved and smiled a second time and headed back to the store.
 
When I got back I had a message waiting for me from my boss. Apparently the the bitch and her bitch decided to get on the blower and let my boss know that I pulled up next to her while she was on the side of the road. She then said that I revved my engine, spun out my tires and kicked mud up at her before doing 40 mph away from the scene of the crime.
 
How on earth, did me smiling, slowing down and waving lead to this? In what world do these people exist in? I did the courteous move and was reprimanded for it. Seriously, what happened to cause this sort of disconnect with reality? Did this lady just receive a DM from her fiancee saying he was going gay? Was she just fired from her job as a professional dog walker and this was her way of coping? It seems like there has to be a purpose behind these kind of bold face lies. The only conclusion I can reasonably come to is that she just got figuratively fisted in some fashion and me and my car topper were the only available targets for her and her ire. That or we're failing to reel in our friends and family who are far too narcissistic to exist in this otherwise awesome world. They just can't live in this life of luxury and be content despite having everything one could ever want. Our disposable income as a nation has increased 469% since 1972. We get to blow more excess green on useless entertainment than ever these days. Sure, our society harbors a small percentage of down-and-out drug addicts that are destitute. There are even a good number of us that have some form of genetic or environmental handicap that prevents us from excelling, but the fact remains that even the poorest of the poor live better than 99% of the entire world's population. I'm not talking about just now either. We've got it better than 99% of everyone that's ever existed. Think about it, even dudes who live in the projects that are jacked out of their mind on crystal meth have at least one TV, government food an Xbox or PlayStation and access to an education (despite all the ill will towards public school and on how we're getting infinitely dumber, the University of Aberdeen did an extensive study on how we are actually increasing in our intellectual abilities - so apparently that free education is working at least a little). The real problem is all of us being spoiled has led to us running out of problems. Thus we're forced to concoct pseudo-psychological ailments (broad spectrum ADD, glutton intolerance, world-revolves-around-me-itis and more) to occupy our time. The natural progression of these disorders is the holding of grudges against others for being content with their seemingly lesser lives. Like me! I'm fairly happy despite barely eclipsing the poverty line. That's why my innocuous smile and harmless wave were construed as me giving her the finger while sticking a pitchfork in her Pit bull. 

I know I've said this before, but please be truthful! Exaggerating about inaccurate events can have real world consequences, like somebody losing a job. The overuse of hyperbole should honestly be a crime (unless that hyperbole comes in the form of semi-amusing posts aimed at mocking others anonymously). It seriously has the same kind of criminal impact in that it can alter the course of someone's life and level of success. At the very least, just give me a heads up when you're going to whine so I can go make up for the misremembered moments by actually enacting the evil that you supposedly witnessed. I mean, if I'm going to get fired, I sure as shit want to have some fun with it.

True Lies

I've noticed that extreme exaggeration seems to be the preferred method of complaining for most pissed off patrons these days. I don't know why this style of whining has become so prevalent, but it's an inarguable fact that the hyperbole has reached such a dramatic level that there simply isn't any truth left to be sifted out of the shit that is the majority of their stories.
 
Let me paint a clearer picture. A few weeks ago I was training a new pizza delivery driver by the name of Ted. Ted's a 65 year-old hippy that's been an avid touring blues musician for over 50 years. What does that have to do with anything, you ask? It means he's as soft as a newborn baby's skull. He's a fucking sweetheart. Sadly, that means he's tender meat for the massive amount of moronically mad customers to zero in on. On the positive side, it meant that training him was painless in that it didn't feel like I was given a full blown evening of acupuncture followed by a deep tissue Sriracha rub down.  

Anyway, part of delivery driver training involves taking these noobs on ride alongs so that they can get a feel for how to tackle the more monotonous parts of the job. It's probably unnecessary to have the guidance go this far, especially considering we're talking about pizza delivery here, but I think that the teaching process is mostly just a procedural thing that we're forced to endure to remove any liability from the store. I mean, if Ted hit the blood thinners and Cialis a little too hard and careened off the road mid-delivery into an orphanage for mentally disabled paraplegics, it's safe to say that our store would probably be sued out of existence. With a paper trail of training they could probably avoid the blame by tossing me under the handicapped bus for employing incorrect training methods, or they could simply make the announcement that he was properly trained and that he just went all AWOL on his own erection filled accord.  Either way their ass would be covered. Thus they always forced a tenured vet (a loser that's been there way too long) like myself to lug the newbies dead weight around. Training is rewarding in its own way, though. I mean, I get to impart important and impossible to learn lessons like how to pry one's fat ass out of the car on an every delivery basis. I also get to delve into other complicated tasks like how to make change without a smart phone and how to drive an automatic transmission while daydreaming about having a better life. 
 
Another bit of coaching that I like to direct at the new blood is to warn them about junkies. For reasons that still remain unclear to me, addicts comprise about 10% of the pizza customer base. I don't know if this is indicative of the state of our country or whether drug abusers simply like to waste their money more frequently than most. Either way, on my second delivery with Ted we were lucky enough to pull down an order for a couple of tweakers that lived out in the middle of nowhere. I actually enjoyed taking the trainees to seedier places, because it sets them up for the reality of the job. Also, if you're wondering how I knew the customers were addicts, it's because I talked to them on the phone three times. Talk may not be the right word, though. I more or less was the recipient of unintelligible grunts and long awkward pauses followed by guttural demands for shit that our store's never served. If you're curious, this is how the conversation went:
 
METH HEAD: I want the chimichanga I ordered last time.
ME: Sorry, we've never had chimichangas.
METH HEAD: That's a lie. I had one delivered last week.
ME: I've worked here ten years, ma'am. We've never had chimichangas.
METH HEAD: I said I wanted a chimichanga.
ME: I'm sorry, I can't help you.
*Hangs up*
*Calls back five minutes later*
METH HEAD: Are you almost here with my chimichanga. 
ME: Like I said, we don't have Mexican food. We're a pizzeria. Also, you hung up on me last time, so I didn't know if you still wanted your order.
METH HEAD: Fine just send me a pizza. I know you're lying, though.   
*Hangs up*
*Calls back five minutes later*
METH HEAD: Where's my food?
ME: You never told me what you wanted on your pizza or where your address was. You just hung up on me again.
METH HEAD: So it's not on it's way?

This is was what Ted had to look forward to as a driver.

When we finally arrived at this addict's house, two people stumbled out to greet us. The first person was a wildly obese, meth addicted white woman that clearly suffered from a debilitating disease known as Can't-put-the-fucking-fork-down-itis. The other individual was a black gentleman that was wearing a hoodie that had the hood over his head in a rather intimidating fashion. This isn't a Trayvon Martin sort of black hate thing either. I'd almost assuredly hesitate if an unkempt white guy was suspiciously wearing a hoodie that was up over his head in the middle of a 95 degree southern California heatwave. Not Ted, though. Ted marched right up to our hoodied friend and asked him how he was doing and what his name was. The man paused and gruffly replied, "Altrear." It was clear from the get-go that Altrear wanted nothing to do with Ted's conversation. He was clearly only there for his homegirl to pay for the food and then to help eat it. That didn't stop Ted from showering him with courtesies that involved how Altrear was such a unique name. Ted even flat out said, "With a name like that you have to be an actor or an artist? Which is it?" The A-train responded with an incredibly irritated, "I rap." My world was instantly turned upside down. A drug addicted black man that's clinging to a morbidly obese white woman? My mind was officially blown. The fact that the credit card that they proceeded to pay me with was declined really blindsided me, too. Who would've guessed it? Seriously, what is this strange alternate universe that I stumbled into? Despite all of this nonsense, Ted seemed unphased by the mountain that we were mining that was filled with stereotyping gold. Instead he just doubled down and gave Altrear a slew of compliments and support in the form of asking a half-dozen follow up questions about his rap skills. After Altrear figuratively flipped off Ted verbally, Ted wished him fame and fortune and we went on our way. That's how nice Ted was.

That's why it made zero sense when later that day we got a phone call about Ted and his first delivery. The call was from an extremely irate random guy from well out of our delivery area. He claimed that while taking his trash to his curb, Ted burned by him at over 80 mph in a 25 mph zone. According to the man on the phone, he literally had to dive out of the way Die Hard-style to avoid being struck. He then followed up his harrowing story by hostilely saying, "A lot of folks around here carry guns. I carry a gun. If I would have had my gun on me I would have shot his windows out." He then began yelling and only stopped when our manager decided that the verbal jabs were packing a little too much of a punch and hung up on him.

First off, folks, stop being dramatic. Ted may have been speeding because he got lost on his very first run, but the customer never had to slow motion dive out of the way. Ted drove a neon green car that looked like the mutant offspring of a Toyota Prius and a Smart Car. That means that there would never be a time in which you'd have to dive out of the way. You could simply take one step in any direction and successfully avoid what looked like a green olive with Ted's pimento ass stuffed into the front of it. This car revelation also meant that the two cylinders and the razor scooter worth of horse power that was under his hood wouldn't have ever allowed his car to make it up to 80, especially on a podunk cliff-side road that sported a speed limit of 25 mph. He may have blown by this guy's driveway doing 35, but that's it. Why exaggerate that? Just call our store, say some guy in a neon car was going a little fast and we'll take care of it. We would simply tell Ted to cool it a little. Problem solved. Instead, this guy, and customers like this guy, think it's necessary to spin their stories into gold by essentially stating that we were smoking a blunt and shotgunning a 40 of Pabst Blue Ribbon while saddled to the back of an orbiting satellite. Just as a heads up, your proclamations about us threatening your life really isn't going to help make or break your case in our eyes. The crazier your story, the more our managers just assume that you were high on mushrooms and that our driver wasn't actually approaching the sound barrier. I'm not saying don't complain. Just don't exaggerate. We can address the problem in a much more expedited fashion if you don't talk about burying us six feet under the ground for supposedly running over your neighbor's dog kennel that was filled with seeing eye dogs and three week old ducklings. I know that seems obvious and straight forward, but apparently it's not, so there's your heads up.

Dredd

Wayne's Wisdom:

Double check everything and don't trust anyone.
 
I've been harshly criticized by nearly everyone in my life for not having enough faith in my fellow man. For example, if I'm taking a trip to Disneyland and I ask my imaginary girlfriend if she's got the tickets, I listen to her response about how she does, then I nod in approval and reach for her purse so I can wrangle up and personally witness the glory that is Goofy's face that's watermarked on every ticket. Why the lack of confidence in my companion? Because when you drive two hours and then walk 14 miles from the only parking structure with any available parking in the greater Los Angeles area, you expect to get in. You don't anticipate having to put your house up as collateral at the nearest Moneytree to afford two additional tickets to the happiest place on earth. Repurchasing tickets is just excruciating when you can mentally picture your first refi that are those two original goddamn tickets that are resting comfortably at home on your kitchen counter.

Apparently a $1000 dollars wasn't enough of a penalty for me to learn my lesson, because another time my girlfriend wanted to go to a casino/concert that's about a 35 minute drive away. She had just turned 18, so she wanted to do something that only 18 year-olds can do. I told her to just go buy a can of Snuff and maybe knock out a pack or two of burners. Apparently she wanted to brain storm a bit more and maybe do something slightly more entertaining. That's when she came up with the idea to go to the concert. I hate leaving the house and interacting with the rest of the world, but I thought that I'd be a primo partner and make her happy. I then took all of 49 seconds to toss on some cargo shorts and a two size too small polo shirt that I had since my days in high school. I even topped my fashion-less foray off by busting out my finest pair of flip-flops. At this point I waited until the Mayan calendar came to end and my first gray pube sprouted. At least that's what it felt like when I was waiting for her to finish applying her makeup, stretch all eleven of her major muscle groups and successfully butter up her behind to fit into an unnecessarily yet provocative and picturesque dress. Seriously girls, I understand sprucing yourself up a bit, but for the love of God, if it takes more time to get ready than it does to enjoy the experience, it's not worth the effort. Smash cut to two hours later and us being about 33 minutes into our 35 minute drive when out of nowhere my Barbie Doll-brained beau enlightened me that she had forgotten her ID. Now, I don't entirely blame her for forgetting the only thing she actually needed to bring. I mean, it's your birthday and you're doing something age related, why would an ID be necessary? Naturally, when I expressed this same sarcasm in her direction it didn't go over too well. By that I mean I never got laid again and our relationship ultimately failed, kind of like my trust in the human race. This is why I decided to take matters into my own hands. I double and triple check with everyone and demand four types of proof for everything. Going on a long road trip? Need your fellow travelers to use the bathroom so you don't have to stop before you break the city limits? Demand to hear the toilet flush, the water rinse and the levies of their bladder burst forth. Need to make sure that that irresponsible co-worker is really going to cover that shift for you? Call them, text them and send them a fucking flock of homing pigeons. By getting a simple and repeated guarantee, you can avoid mistakes and having to hate everyone around you.
          
Unfortunately, these types of moves have forever branded me as a distrustful douche. It's also ensured that I never face the consequences of the infuriatingly frustrating. That's not to say that I don't personally mess anything up. I flirt and full-on fornicate with failure frequently. The key is that I'm suffering the wraith of my own retardedness. Not reaping the rudeness of society that's comprised of mostly selfishly motivated shitheads.
 
My ex-roommate, former pizza delivery driver brother, and quasi-best friend, Matt, leaned a lot more on the opposite end of the optimistic and open minded spectrum. That's why one day when he took a delivery, he was politely greeted, generously tipped and then given a horrific look of utter astonishment, all within the same 17 seconds of space and time. You see, this customer decided to make a reasonable, somewhat common, and some would say, mildly condescending move where he checked to make sure his order was correct. Some retail workers find this lack of trust in our ability disturbing and patronizing. I find it following my wisdom to a tee. Customers shouldn't trust retail workers. For the most part we're a bunch of pot smoking, drunkards that spend more time playing beer pong than we do at work. Matt's middle aged customer was apparently wise enough to understand our intellectual inferiority and really got the full effect of it when he opened his pizza box and saw that there was a slice of pizza missing from his pie.  Turns out our drug addicted head manager, Luis, got super baked and thought it would be a bright idea to pilfer some already paid for pizza. Think about that for a second, this is a guy who was supposedly the cream of the retarded crew crop. A store owner literally had to sit down with this goon and decide that he was a leader. It's terrifying that an owner that probably has more cash stuffed in his money clip than I'll ever earn in my life surmised that this grifter should have power over the rest of us. According to Matt, the customer gave him a look like it was him who had stolen the errant slice, which is the dumbest of all the assumptions. Why would the guy delivering the food do the defiling? He was responsible for the foods safe arrival and would obviously take the brunt of the attack if anything was mishandled. This is where the idiom "Don't kill the messenger" shows its level of truth. I mean, do you get super pissed when the mail man delivers you your credit card bill? No, and you shouldn't. We're merely traveling with and ultimately handing you somebody else's hard work. Oh, by the way, nothing ever happened to our lovely manager, Luis. He simply took the call and talked his way out of any trouble by bribing the man with free food that wasn't his to give out.

This is why I don't trust others. It's also why I made sure that I double checked every pizza that I ever delivered, I chatted with every insider that gave me a questionable address and triple checked all the money that I managed to squeeze out of every last one my customers. Seriously, when patrons inevitably gave me a 10 gallon trash bag full of moist nickels to pay for their thirty dollar order, I made sure to count it. I didn't take their word for it, because half the people in this world are liars and the other half are unreliable at best. Don't take my word for it, though. Try this technique out, because I'm betting you'll find out that life goes much more smoothly when you bet on your own abilities.

Anti-Christ

"Blacks hate Jews. Everyone knows that."

Co-workers say the darnedest things don't they? I think we're all aware of the ignorance of most company employees that we're forced to co-habitat with, but why does it seem that they're always raising the crazy bar with their level of craptastic conversational diarrhea? 

This line wasn't even uttered as a joke. It was said by a fanatical liberal with a deadpan look and a seriousness that implied that I was completely out of touch for not knowing that hard hitting truth. This cohorts name was Calva, and he was absolutely flabbergasted that I was so naive. He just stared at me like I had been water-locked up in Kodiak, Alaska for the last 17 years with only the wilds of the wilderness to educate me. Just take a second to think about that. His statement caught me off guard. That's big news because according to him I'm a moderately racist republican that's lived a blessed life borne out of white privilege. I mean, that's technically true. It's absolute luck that landed me in a home with poor anti-social parents. The fact that my Dad was so addicted to gambling that he lost our home and then promptly took my Mom and fled to Minnesota was a boon too. How else would I have gotten to experience the glory of living in my ex-girlfriend's motorcycle trailer? That's about as privileged as a life gets right there.
 
Anyway, if you're thinking that I just grabbed this quote out of context, you're wrong. Calva was notorious for just blurting out random bits of baffling rhetoric. Seriously, remember that name, because it'll crop up a hell-of-a-lot more often that's for goddamn sure. In this particular case he dropped this magical line as a reason for Obama's lack of desire to protect or support Israel, which makes the statement all the more baffling. I mean, I'm in staunch support of beefing up the borders here in southern California, but that doesn't mean I hate Hispanics. I mean, I do, but that's just sort of a weird coincidence. Correlation not causation, you know? Seriously, I'm not a fan of President Obama, but I'm also not of the opinion that he harbors an ethnic grudge against a group of people that I'm sure he rarely interacted with in the suburbs of Chicago. Even if his home was surrounded by Hasidic Jews, I'm willing to bet that you don't make it all the way up the overwhelmingly white power presidential chain while harboring ill will towards a specific group. There are a few too many checks and balances (jowly necked old Jews) to go through to make it to the summit of sole power while enacting your ignorance onto a whole imperiled populous. 

Also, it's curious that Calva would imply that everyone should know that these two factions despise one another. My question is who knows that? Where would blacks and Jews clash? They live no where near one another, both groups eat fucked up food and both make up a combined total of about 10% of the population. Not exactly an overwhelming chance that they'd cross paths let alone clash culturally. Seriously, though, why the funky food people? Biscuits and gravy looks like a loaf of bread got lost in between the seat cushions of the Brazzers' bang bus for an entire eight hour shift. Meanwhile gefilte fish is essentially filling up the kitchen sink, loading it up with dirty dishes and then just not doing them for four fermentation filled weeks and then calling it food. It's the 21st century here people. Have a hoagie. 

You know what? I'm going to tap out of this story right now. I didn't want to get into then and I don't want to get into it now. Too many racist highways and byways for me to drunkenly speed down and crash and burn on. I'm definitely thinking that I'll revisit what I believe could be a repeated segment, though. I think I'll call it, "Another Super Serious Quandry With Calva." 

Brokeback Mountain

There have been a number of times that I've questioned my employment over the years. Not just because I'm scrubbing the last of my self-esteem from my body by nearly being 30 and still washing the pepperoni grease off of pans that previously housed overly processed pig fat. No, the real puzzlement and pitiful introspection doesn't stem from my personal failures, but from the abuse that my fellow delivery brethren and I take, or more specifically, the punishment that our employers force us to endure on a near daily basis. For example, there's a customer that would routinely get super blazed, drink a couple of handles of Wild Turkey and then order a pizza. You can probably guess how those phone calls would go. There would be a lot of loud drunken demands, no real details and a number of overt threats about how we better not fuck up, "or else!" 

The phone call was the fun part, though. Personally delivering an artery clogging entree to the middle-aged alcoholic is where things would get a little hairy. That might have had to do with the fact that the methed out version of Steve Carell from Anchorman lived on a mountaintop that didn't actually have a road leading to it. I'm going to be generous here and call the nature trail that led to this addicts abandoned fifth wheel a fire road. That may not be the right word, though. "Fire road" implies a road that is passable, it generally doesn't mean that you'll encounter jagged rocks that'll ultimately rip out your car's oil well and shred your tires. I'm not upset by the untraversable terrain, though. I'm pretty sure that the obstacles were God's way of trying to tell me to turn the hell around. Unfortunately my complaints to management and the Man upstairs' attempts to skewer my suspension  never hit home for the higher-ups. That meant that once I weaved my way up to the peak I got to take in the all encompassing glory of a three wheeled trailer that was covered from top to bottom in what looked like gang tagging. Except it wasn't gang tagging. It was just spray paint that was applied by the evil that was the overly inebriated a-hole of a customer. The creative Krylon art spelled out subtle messages like "Go Away," "Will Shoot," and "Beware;" all of which are an incredibly enticing invitation for a pizza delivery guy that had to free climb a four banger up the summit or Mt. Smirnoff. 

My first visit to this semi-homeless squatter went as well as one can expect. I pulled up, he drunkenly stumbled out of his sardine can of a home and aggressively took the food from me. At least he handed me a few crumpled up bills before he proceeded to pilfer the pizza from my possession. That is, not before he stared me in the eyes and said, "If you hear gunfire when you're leaving, that's just me getting in a little target practice with my rifle." I never heard any gunfire, but I did hear a starting pistol in my own mind that signaled that the time had come to acknowledge that my life was worth far more than the pineapple pizza and penne pasta that a billion dollar business was forcing me to funnel into the hands of untrained terrorists.

This is my way of telling you to constantly reevaluate your life. Don't accept a tragic existence for a little extra in your bank account. Also, don't be blind to your bullshit job. Realize when you can do better and when the pain isn't worth the payoff. Life's just too short to bang your head against a wall and be belittled. 

Dumb and Dumber

I've thoroughly detailed my disgust for customers, co-workers and even bosses. What I haven't touched on are the criminally insane that fill out the rest of the population. There's a legion of losers, especially in southern California, that fall squarely into their own utterly insane category. This ever increasing number of nut jobs are generally unemployed, uneducated and unsober. I don't think unsober is actually a word, but I'm rolling with it because it hurts to recount the ransacking they're doing to my life on a near daily basis. I feel ungood every time I'm forced to interact with these intellectual shortchanged sloths and I'm beginning to think that their reign of paste licking terror is beginning to rub off on my writing.
 
Anyway, not too long ago I came in contact with the perfect example of what I'm referring to here. I was getting ready to take a pizza delivery when a disheveled looking twenty year-old parked his mountain bike in front of our store and wandered on in. The man looked a little like he was left out to languish in the earthly elements, but besides a bit of excess dirt on his pants and an unkempt neck beard, there really wasn't anything too out of the ordinary about the guy. That is, until he launched into a preplanned speech about how he needed $15 because it was an emergency. Don't be foolish enough to think that there was a specific reason behind his request or that there were hard hitting details about what the emergency was either. He was simply stuck in an unknown quandary that could apparently be conquered with a little less than an Andrew Jackson and a little more than an Alexander Hamilton.
 
As was always the case, our crew collaboratively said no. Can you imagine the precedent that we would be setting if we started allocating money to the drug addled and the delusional. The second that that semi-homeless man made it back to the KFC dumpster that he was sleeping in, we'd be done for. He'd gloat to all the other grease trap and gutter skulking grifters about the goods he managed to get out of us. Before we'd even know it, there'd be a disease of detestable drifters lining up to get their dirty mitts on our hard earned money. 

The glory of drifters are that they're never content with dropping their case at the first no that they receive. They always redouble their efforts and come up with unbelievable bullshit. This man was no exception. After being denied the emergency $15 dollars that he was hoping for, he pulled out a smartphone and said he'd sell it to us. Our first thought was that he must have stolen a phone, but before we could even fully judge the man, he honestly informed us that the phone was broken and that it wouldn't actually turn on. He then took it a step further and said, "Yeah, I tried to sell it at the Verizon Store, but they'd only give me $2 dollars worth of in-store credit." After punctuating that impressively forthright bit of non-fiction, he then said, "So how about it? I, um, need it for gas." It was a seamless transition. From fact to fiction in less than a sentence. I mean, why would a vagabond on a ten-speed need gas money? Unless he was going to huff the fumes of his newly pumped 87 octane, him and his appropriately named Huffy were kind of shit out of luck in the utility department.

It took about seven different ways for us to tell him to piss off before he finally got the hint and left. And by left, I mean he hopped on his bike and peddled over to the office of the autoshop across the street in an attempt to mooch more money. 

If only that were the end. The end came in the form of the same freeloader coming in around four hours later asking for $25 dollars. I'm guessing that he plead his empty case to every operation across town and that he was on lap two of his lecherous demands. My question is when did the price of his emergency go up? Wouldn't you go down as opposed to up? I mean, I thought it was ballsy to ask for $15. Usually the needy start with pocket change and eventually work their way up to a Washington. This hobo all-star was a straight shooter, though. He went all in. Why peddle for peanuts when you can go straight for the grand prize. I appreciate that kind of boldness too. The fact that he's willing to ride around town for ten hours a day, not fear rejection and shoot for the stars is admirable. I can't even subscribe to Match.con because my self-esteem is too fragile to accept the possibility of being refused a date by an overweight, cat lover that works the graveyard shift at Denny's. I can't imagine being told to fuck off by every person of power in a city that has a population of 72,000. I wish I had half of that unwavering confidence and a fraction of that air of, "I don't give a shit." It's a sort of massively misguided form of determination. I just don't get why that uncaring, overly confident personality trait has to go hand in hand with not showering, refusing employment and committing lewd acts in front of eleven year-olds. 

I have to respect how this guy's begging price increased as the day wore on, though. It's like he was hoping to run us ragged with his rich demands. All I really want to know is the exact moment that it dawned on him that he needed to make the savvy business decision to double the rate of his shitty form of solicitation. I guess it just goes to show you that you don't need to be a customer to provoke people and you don't need to be a fellow work peon to piss off your fellow man. You just need to suck the valuable time and energy out of the marrow of those around you.   

The Elephant Man

In an unexpected bout of generosity, I've decided to bless those around me with a second consecutive week of Wayne's Wisdom. Here it is: 

Don't shit in an already clogged toilet.
 
This is what a fellow co-worker of mine decided to do. It's unexplainable. We were having issues with our drains when Calva, our elderly Ecuadorian delivery driver, decided to double down on the damage that was already being done to our dumper. By that I mean he walked into the store, past the employee billboard with the warning sign that read, "DON'T USE THE TOILET. WE'RE HAVING DRAIN ISSUES," waddled right by the three unit dish sink that was overflowing up the sink and back into the store and made his way right into the bathroom. The same restroom that had a toilet that had water up to the lid because the pipes were so incredibly backed up. He then proceeded to plant his enormous ass on the seat and set Mr. Hankey free. 

How does anybody display this type of blind ignorance? It's not just that he missed all the warning signs leading up to his laying a log in the latrine. The astounding part is that he placed his derriere on a dumper that was nearly discharging dirty water onto the tile floor. His sac had to literally soak in shitty water when him and his panis decided to envelop the toilet. The water was entirely too high. There's no way that his butt-cheeks and ball sac didn't  go for a dip in the world's worst sludge filled spa. That's where it gets confusing. When your nether-regions feel like someone took a shit filled Super Soaker to them, you'd think there'd be a moments hesitations before unloading your log.  In Calva's defense, I guess there'd be zero splash back. Your ass would essentially be at one with the backdoor bomb and the bowl of bile filled water. It would essentially be like shitting in zero gravity.

The fantastic part of the whole situation is that the entirety of the crew realized the crime against humanity that Calva was going to commit before he even committed it. I even tried to stop the abomination before it began. I sprinted for the door the second I heard the click of the restroom's deadbolt. Once I got to the door, I knocked and said, "Calva, the toilets are clogged, what are you doing????!!" His reply? "....You're too late." And that's an understatement, because our boss wound up having to remove this wrongdoing from the restroom before the plumber arrived. Think about that the next time you bandy about the idea of owning your own store. Just realize that you might have to strain some Spanish shit out of some seriously stagnant water before your nights over with.

Let this be a lesson to everyone. People don't pay attention, minimum wage workers have less life in them than a morgue at midnight and nothing gets in the away of the obese when they need to liberate a snickers bar.
 
Seriously, just pay attention to what you're doing. If you sit down on the ol' porcelain throne and you feel like you've waterlogged your Wonder Mop, you should probably play it safe and chamber that prairie dog that's poking out. I think it's safe to say that everything will work out for you. It's pretty safe to assume that there are enough restrooms around town to accommodate even the most elephantine sized arse.        

Just Cause

There are a ton of ways to improve oneself. There are tens of thousands of self help books that are written by everybody. It seems like if you have even an ounce of juice then you're penning some self-help title. From Oprah all the way down to your town's transgender that fancies him/herself a writer, everyone's in on the improvement game. In addition to books, there's a plethora of life gurus out there like Tony Robbins and Richard Carlson that are trying to improve upon our collective quality of life, albeit while removing an untold sum of cash from our bank account in the process, but still. There's even therapy and medication that can assist with the whole idea of improving one's mental well being. Well, now you can add me to the lengthy list of life leaders, because I'm about to drop a hot bit of knowledge on you that will undoubtedly improve your position in this world. 

Dress the part. That's it. That's the nugget of knowledge. What do I mean? I mean, don't do what an 17 year-old did the other day when he walked into our store and asked for an application while wearing a t-shirt that said "The Way High Patrol." Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not saying apply at your local Taco Bell in a three piece suit, cuff-links and a bowler hat. I'm just saying bypass the shirt in your dresser drawer that makes reference to how you like to hit the reefer. The flat billed hat that makes the proclamation that Mexico is superior to America might be a touch over the top too. I'm not overly patriotic, but suggesting you fancy a country that's run by an organization that mules heroin into neighboring countries by using the stomachs of toddlers as mobile fanny packs might be a mistake. 

This doesn't just apply to fast food gigs either. The same code applies for when you want an office job. Show up in dress pants and a button up shirt. Don't submit your application while sporting beige corduroy shorts, a My Chemical Romance t-shirt and an oversized belt buckle that spells out "Fuck You" in chrome lettering. And yes, that happened too. You would think that this advice would be self-explanatory, but apparently it isn't, because this kid actually applied in this creative attire. And his application artistically expressed itself down to the bottom of our store dumpster because of it too. It didn't forge its own path there, though. The document needed a hearty assist from an individual that didn't think his love of smoking spliffs ran counter to his hirability. 

This is just the first of what I'm going to prematurely proclaim will be many nuggets of wisdom that I'll be dropping, so expect more life altering lessons from what I'm going to affectionately call, 'Wayne's Wisdom.'