Biting the Hand That Feeds You

 

Biting the Hand That Feeds You

©2018  Ross Williams

 

 

After a long and ethically challenging career as a data analyst for DoD war planning, execution and sustainment systems, I have managed to find a second career at the freaky fast Jimmy Johns.  I sometimes like to say that Papa Johns is our parent company − mostly to looks of vacant noncomprehension − but we are actually owned by the same holding company that also owns Arby’s and Buffalo Wild Wings.  JJs and B-Dubs are both overpriced, but you’ll at least get your food within a calendar week when you come to Jimmy.

I’m a delivery driver.  I’m on the road multiple times a day with drivers from the general public.  When a customer doesn’t want to come to Jimmy, I come to the customer.  I usually end up getting annoyed while doing it.  Because other people are pretending to know how to drive.  Here’s a few brief words about Other People’s Driving:

 

Learn to drive.  Much of the annoyance of Other People’s Driving would be solved by Other Drivers reviewing [and thereupon doing] what they were taught on the first day of Driver’s Ed.

 

Specifically, green lights don’t mean “Aww! Look at the pretty color!”  They mean move, so find your gas pedal. 

Additionally, the gas is on the right.  Your right hand is the one you used to change the radio station with, or which you now wildly gesticulate with, in case you’ve forgotten …which most of you seem to have.

 

Don’t leave multiple car lengths in front of you at red lights; that’s extremely rude and adds to traffic congestion for a half mile behind you.

 

The center turn lane is for turning left.  Left is the opposite of right.  And I know it’s confusing for many of you, so here’s a hint: pull all the way into the lane.  Do not straddle the line and block traffic behind you.

 

Fergodsake stop carrying on American Sign Language conversations in the front seat.  At least one hand has to stay on the wheel.  You may wildly gesticulate with only one hand at a time.

 

And lastly, I don’t really care if you’re on the phone while you’re driving… if you can drive and prattle at the same time.  Cops and other Police Statists don’t want to hear this, but some people can actually use a phone and drive concurrently.  I see it often enough.  However, if you are one who can’t do both − and I see this often enough as well − then put down the goddamned phone.

 

Exactly halfway into each of my deliveries I get to interact with customers in their own environment, wherever that may be − their home or place of business.  I see them in their own comfort zone.  They are sometimes too comfortable.

One February lunchtime three years ago I delivered to a home in a subdivision where a couple was apparently getting a jump on spring cleaning.  Their front stoop had two steps leading up to the front door.  I stayed on the stoop to be out of the way of the storm door when it opened.  I rang the bell.  A few seconds later a guy came to the door and opened it.  A tall guy.  In a ratty t-shirt and even rattier moth-eaten gym shorts.  I was two steps below him and was presented, at eye level, with his crotch which bore most of the damage from the moths.  He was commando that day.  I briefly considering calling 1-800-GOT-JUNK, but there wasn’t much.

 

I remember this address.

 

Customers’ hyper-comfort is not always a bad thing, however.  The mornings after teen-ager and young adult holidays are popular for having food delivered for hang-over breakfast at the crack of noon.  And not uncommonly the people calling for this food are young ladies, typically wearing the little-to-nothing they slept in, or maybe they’ll throw a t-shirt − and nothing else − over it.

 

I remember these addresses as well.

Drivers remember a lot of addresses.  Besides those of the semi-dressed and hung-over females, our favorites are those who tip us well.  In my state, delivery drivers are considered “servers”.  Essentially a waiter on wheels, not unlike the roller-skated carhops of my parents’ generation’s drive-ins.  We make well below minimum wage while driving, and we make up for that by collecting tips from those we serve. Those who tip us well are rewarded by being served promptly.

 

There’s a dietary consultant across the street from us.  They can stand in their doorway and wave, and we can wave right back.  Driving to them, due to the intervening traffic lights and side street entrances to parking lots, can take four minutes depending on traffic.  Darting across the street − playing Frogger as we call it − can take as much as forty-five seconds.  I grew up on Frogger.  I am rewarded with five dollar tips on a twelve dollar delivery; ten if it’s raining.

On the other hand, we also remember the addresses of poor tippers, or no-tippers, and we reward them by taking enough, but not too much, time, and by marking their phone numbers in our system as bad tippers.  We also insult them behind their backs − other drivers know bad tippers by reputation.

 

Before anyone asks, no we don’t spit in anyone’s food.  First, the food we deliver is all wrapped, and second, a driver very rarely makes the food he delivers.  Those who do make the food don’t know good tippers from bad tippers and wouldn’t know whose food to spit on in any event.

As regards tips, though, and the difference between a good tip and bad, if you tip your driver nothing … that’s a bad tip.  These no-tips usually happen with credit card payments, but we’ll get the odd customer who has the exact change in cash.  And just to punctuate the insult, they’ll often go out of their way to count out that exact change for us detailing, down to the penny, that we are getting exactly what is on the receipt.

 

Just remember, your driver has gone out in the weather to bring you your lunch because you couldn’t be bothered, or because you simply couldn’t.  And in my part of the country, the weather is almost never pleasant.  For every day that is just a delight to be outside, there are three that are unbearably cold, six that are precipitating [typically abundantly], and fifteen that are unbearably hot with humidity pushing “sauna”.  If you can’t be bothered to go out in those conditions and want someone else to do it for you then crack open your wallet.

Ironically enough, banks are, on the whole, probably the worst for not tipping drivers.  Hint, tellers: it’s your money this time; be free with it.

 

Another bad tip is the round-up.  These are mostly the cash deliveries.  The order will be $14.68 and we’ll get fifteen dollars.  “Keep the change.”  Yay!  Thirty-two cents, and it’s all for me!  I’ll be sure to pay off the mortgage with My Precious … and another 242,907 tips just like it.  The rest of the drivers, college kids mostly, are sure to cover their tuition.  Some days a driver will collect enough round-ups to pre-treat the corn fields of Iowa, Nebraska and Kansas.

One dollar is a bad tip, but not outright insulting.  …unless it’s given on the lunch delivery for multiple people.  A dollar and change − for a single-person delivery − is better.  A little.  Two dollars for a single-lunch delivery is good.  It’s typical.  For multiple-person deliveries, two dollars per person is good.  Ten percent is also good.  Four people from the same office all ordering Jimmy Johns can reach $50 rather easily, and five dollars on this is acceptable.

 

On large catering orders where the total will be anywhere from $70 on up, two dollars is cheap.  Five dollars is on the high side of cheap.  Ten is good − unless the total comes to $150 or more, then it’s twenty.  Ten percent is still good.  We still get stiffed on these from time to time.  My personal record for getting stiffed is on an almost $500 catering order.

 

An uncommon number of customers will argue − usually over the phone, but sometimes in person as we’re standing at their doorstep − that they are the ones insulted by being asked to tip while also being charged a delivery fee.  I believe these people are all named Karen.  Some will make the claim that the driver gets the delivery fee AND the tip, and paying twice for the same thing is highway robbery.

Here’s the thing: the driver does not get the delivery fee; the franchise owner does.  The franchise owner then turns around and uses that money to buy the liability insurance necessary to operate a delivery service just so a customer who can’t be bothered to go out in weather doesn’t have to go out in weather when he’s hungry.  You’re welcome.  Now crack open your wallet.

 

Some other tipping-related issues that we like to discuss when we get back to the store are the folks who don’t know how to make change.  It is amusing to us drivers, or frustrating, depending on how the day is going.  Even given that some of our drivers aren’t good at making change themselves, I am, and I am easily moved to snark when I get back from the delivery.

 

I recently delivered lunch to a college kid working a summer job for the local YMCA’s summer daycamp.  He was well cut, well groomed, had all his teeth, had clear eyes, spoke fairly well … obviously not stupid and apparently not on drugs.  His lunch came to $13.84.  He gave me a twenty.  I know, without having to furrow my brow, that change for this is $6.16.  We don’t carry coins; only bills.  I fished my store-provided small bill change-for-a-twenty out of my pocket and asked, “How much change you need?”

 

He stood there with a dopey look on his face and said, without embarrassment, “I can’t do that kind of math.”

Dude, that’s not math; that’s arithmetic.  When I went to school back in the age of dinosaurs, that kind of arithmetic was learned by third grade, and we learned to do it in our head.  It’s now taught by using sixteen sheets of paper, four number lines, and at least three different colored crayons, all while “showing your work”.  The proper process for solving this simple problem now takes five minutes or more.  The result of this educational gimmick is people who cannot make change but who can instead make stupid faces when confronted with the arduous task of making change.  This, my dear public education system, is not an improvement.

I said nothing to him, but gave him six dollars and was on my way.  I gladly traded a sixteen cent round-up for a snarky story for my fellow drivers.

 

While we’re discussing the failures of the public education system, what is it with the nazi-lite fake security in schools?  I don’t want to hear feeble excuses about school violence to justify the inept and laughable theatrics.  I spent well over thirty years either in the military, or working for the military on top secret programs where site security was actually a going concern.  What public schools in my delivery zone do isn’t security; it’s employment outreach for the mentally handicapped.

I’ve been met by public school “security officers” on the sidewalk − they came out to intercept me − screaming a series of inarticulate orders at me.  I’ve been told that I’m suspicious, just by coming unannounced to a school building; when I responded that this is called paranoia, I was deafened by high-pitched screeching somewhere between Bad Brakes and Dog Whistle.

 

My most interesting encounter, and the one that got me uninvited to further deliveries to that school, centered on an early morning catering delivery to the local junior high school.  Correction: the local middle school, unknowingly ironically named “Liberty”.  This school district paid an educational consulting firm roughly two million dollars a couple decades ago to learn that they should retitle the junior high as a middle school.  The educational return on investment would be worth it, the district was assured.

And for the consulting firm, it was.  The consultants learned that this school district was being run by fools with [temporarily] more money − way too much of it derived from my property taxes − than brains.

The delivery I made consisted of two large and fairly heavy catering bags filled with eighteen or twenty box lunches.  Someone was hosting a seminar.  The order came to around two hundred dollars.  I struggled up the long, wide, sweeping sidewalk with my load, one bag in each hand.

 

Eight glass entrance doors, and seven were locked [security!]; the last one pulled open.  The lights were off inside the school.  My Transition Lens® glasses might as well have been made out of cloth for all I could see through them.  I peeked over my glasses and under the brim of my hat and saw the open door for the school office a few feet ahead and to my left.  Great, that’s where I’m going.

 

I took a step toward the school office door.  “Way you goin!” I heard booming at me from a deep and cluttered male voice.  I looked around but couldn’t see anything.

“I’m going to the office,” I replied.

“Gotta sign in.”

 

“What for?” I queried.

 

“It’s security.”

Oh.  Sure.  Because “security”.  Meaningful security would require them to open and inspect eighteen or twenty Jimmy Johns box lunches to check for the weapons everyone is so paranoid about.  They’d have to unwrap ditto submarine sandwiches, same pickle spears…  I sighed “Ohfergodsake.”

 

“Look,” came the snotty rejoinder, “this is for the kids!  If you got a problem, tell them in the office.”

“That’s exactly where I’m trying to go.”  The irony in this irony-deficient junior high school was lost on him.  About this time my glasses cleared, my eyes adjusted and I could see who I was talking to.  Fifty feet inside the school [because, once more, ”security”] and forty feet past the door to my destination, was a skinny old man about my age with poorly constructed and even worse maintained dental work sitting at a table in the darkened foyer of the middle school.  A sign hung off the front of the table saying ”Security Desk.  Sign in”.

“Hey!  I’m just doing my job!” he gruffly clattered over and around his loose partials.

 

…here’s a hint.  Don’t ever, ever tell me you’re “just doing your job.”  That is clue number one that you don’t know what your job actually is and that you are nothing more than a barely-trained ape.  I am not polite to people who “just do their job”, and this goes for cops, judges, and TSA brownshirts − all of whom I’ve bawled out and left stammering and indignant.  My most common response to those who “just do their job” is to allude to their fascist tendencies.  As I did on this day.

 

“The guards at Auschwitz just did their job, too,” I responded.

“Well, I don’t know about them,” he explained, “but I’m working here.”

 

This truly caught me by surprise.  I just called him a nazi, and he was too dumb to not be fine with it.  I actually snorted a laugh.  Figuring I had just won this battle of wits, I put down the two bags of Other People’s Lunch, and walked to his [ahem] security desk.  “Okay!  Let’s make these kids safe!” I said.

I signed his book, still chuckling.  For all he knew I was carrying eighteen or twenty cluster bombs cleverly disguised as ham and cheese subs, with each pickle spear a detonator controlled by the class bell that would ring at the end of fourth period.  But as long as I signed his idiot book, his was a job well done.  Because “security”.

 

I picked up the two bags from where I’d left them, carried them into the office, and found the person who’d ordered it.  I got the credit slipped signed, and left the office.  As I emerged back into the foyer, the “security” guy venomously wished me a nice day.  I extended my right hand toward him, palm down, and said, “Sieg heil, mein Herr.”

Sometime between my leaving and my getting back to the shop, he figured out that he’d been insulted, but he obviously wasn’t quite sure how.  He’d tattled to the principal, making up the only plausible story he could think of.  She called the store; I answered the phone.  She wanted to complain to the manager about my having “flipped him off”.  I offered to tell her exactly what had actually happened, as it would be both accurate and make me look even more rude than merely birding a bossy ignoramus.

 

But Karen did not want to hear it.  Because, as a natural adjunct to security, academic integrity is in full blossom at this misnamed paranoid institute of public learning.

 

And thus I was permanently uninvited to deliver to this school, a fact for which I am indescribably grateful.  My fellow drivers envy me, because no matter the size of the tip, it is not worth it to be accused without evidence and made to jump through psychotic hoops for the privilege of delivering someone’s lunch.  “Security” “procedures” at these schools, four minutes away, are significantly more rigorous now and when a driver clocks out to a school, he’s guaranteed to be gone for a half hour at least.

Bottom line: if you want food delivered, don’t be gratuitous assholes to the guys who deliver it.  Don’t even be mere assholes.  Seriously, why does this need to be said?

 

There’s an office building in our delivery zone.  It’s a regional data center for the state’s public library system.  They do nothing but keep track of which library in the region has how many books, which library has [since we’re on the subject of nazis] borrowed The Diary of Anne Frank from which other library.  They track it all on desktop computers powered by the first generation Intel Hamster Wheel that no self-respecting thief would steal − he’d never be able to fence it.  They have no money in this office, not even piles of overdue book fines.  Their data isn’t valuable to anyone but themselves.  And arguably not even that.

Yet their doors are locked.  But of course they’re locked!

And virtually everyone in their office loves Jimmy Johns.  They call for delivery a few times a week, and it’s almost never the same person.  Yet we have to beg permission to enter their mysteriously hallowed hall with an intercom buzzer system, and they sometimes ask who it is.

“Uh… Jimmy Johns.”

 

“What do you want?”

 

Well, no one ever said state workers were particularly bright.  Those at the library data center aren’t even particularly good tippers.  At least I got a twenty from my final delivery to the junior high school.

Also not particularly bright are those who make excuses for their employer.  These people are right behind the Guard-at-Auschwitz “I’m just doing my job” nazi numskulls.  Their office doors are locked the same as state office buildings, requiring special permission to deliver their lunch.  Once I asked, “Uh… why do you make us wait out in the rain with your lunch…?”

 

“Company policy.”

 

“What purpose does that policy serve?”

“I don’t know, you’d have to ask them.”

 

I spent around 35 years in bureaucratic organizations, arguably the most bureaucratic of bureaucratic organizations: the military and defense contracting.  I can say with zero risk of meaningful contradiction that a “company policy” the purpose of which is not intuitively obvious to the employees of that company is nothing more than an act of overcompensation by the Vice President of Narcissism.  “Dig me!  I’ve gotten everyone in my fiefdom to dance on puppet strings!”

Yeah, aren’t you cool. I’ll make sure to hold the bag with your lunch the farthest out in the rain.

 

Look, it shouldn’t be this difficult to deliver someone’s lunch.  It shouldn’t be difficult at all.  It should be the simplest thing on earth: food.  And it’s coming to you just because you asked it to.

 

If you can’t make it easy for this to happen, if you insist on going out of your way to make it difficult, then here’s what you can do: get your self-important ass in your car and come to us. Or starve.  Your choice.

 

I’m easy that way.