Two days down, no end in sight.

Sunday was my second time working back at my old local pizza shop as a delivery driver. As opposed to last time. I had an enormous plus and that was I did not have to take care of the dumpster out back. I am so glad I didn’t have to do this. I pulled up and there was the giant green monster of a garbage bin, you know the one made of solid steel, just overflowing with rotting leftover food, wet cardboard boxes, giant plastic gallons full of old grease, and empty plastic drink cups from the pub and a bar connected to the same building. The owner of pizza shop also owns the pub and bar. I expected to walk and be told to start out back and beginning picking up, but not this week. This week there was a delivery waiting, calling my name to drive a couple blocks down to a senior citizen apartment building to deliver two toasty bagels with cream cheese, it was ten in the morning with a $1.00 tip.

Not a bad way to start the day and it gave way for such promise in the day. With such a start things were looking up. I spent the next couple of hours prepping food for the week, waiting and hoping for a delivery. I grated cheese, prepped dough, did the dishes, made cardboard boxes and swept before the next delivery. All of those tasks should have intermingled with delivering pizza, stromboli’s, calzones, subs and salads, but alas they did not. All this work was finished within the first couple hours of being there with nothing else to do. By now it was about 1pm with four more hours to go. I had seven more deliveries during the rest of my shift before my final delivery for the day and I am not sure why this always happens, but it is the worst. Not because of the customer, but of my own stupidity. I got lost, lost in a town(the city calls it a city) of maybe 20,000 people. It should be illegal for a street to be separated by a manufacturing building with no indication of such spilt on a map.

As a result of the split I needed to call the customer to get directions and I must have sounded like a bumbling idiot with my “where? What street? No, I don’t know, oh okay, I know where that is.” It took me fifteen minutes to deliver that pizza and it literally was two miles from the pizza shop. The customer was extremely forgiving for my idiocy and was quite generous with the tip. They tipped me $4 and change, my largest tip of the day.

Total miles driven during Sunday’s odyssey: 28.4 miles.

Total amount of tips: $17.84. That averages just under $2.00 tip per delivery. Which is great, but if it wasn’t for the $4.xx tip on the last run the tips would have averaged $1.50. I didn’t get stiffed at all this week.

Is my seven hours of time worth it? It was hard not to focus on just the tip amount and to keep in mind that I do get an hourly wage on top of it. So, every Sunday I work I make about $60. Multiply that by generally four Sundays a month and that is another $240 towards the plasectomy.