These Pizzas Won't Deliver Themselves, Part II

These Pizzas Won’t Deliver Themselves, Part II: The Destruction of the Mike

By Michael “America is Still Pretty Good” Pape

I know you want to hear more about deliveries, but I need to first tell you about the Birds, because they’re awesome. Texas has these giant black birds that look like they’re covered in tar all over the place. When I used to walk to my other, non-Pizza-delivery job, certain members of this race of bird would “buzz” me if I walked what they considered to be the “wrong” way around Micro Center. By “buzz” I mean one would wait until I least expected it and swoop down over my right shoulder, close enough that I felt its wind as it passed by. The first time this happened, I was understandably freaked out. Here was this bird (which was practically the size of my 25lb dog, btw) pseudo-attacking me because I happened to walk the wrong way. What was this, bird gang territory? Someone needs to remember what species he or she is, I thought. Needless to say, after a couple of those “buzzes”, I started taking the long way around the building. I considered just bringing a bat to work and showing this bird what’s what, but I didn’t need the stress of being involved in a real-live episode of Man vs. Beast (remember that Fox show?), so I signed a peace treaty with the Birds and wimped out.

I know what you’re thinking, but this does apply to what we’re discussing here, silly. You see, there are rows of big, leafy trees in the parking lot that the PP is located in. These big, leafy trees are loud pretty much year-round here in Dallas, except for those couple of months when it can get below freezing. I say they’re loud because the first thing you notice when you get out of your car is the noise coming from the trees – you have to raise your voice sometimes if you want to be heard over the racket. There are your typical crow-like “caws”, there are noises that sound like carnival rides, and there are noises that sound like electronic equipment shorting out. These are the many varieties of big black birds indigenous to this area, and they apparently all gather for a daily convention right across from the PP.

<>One time, the old manager of the PP made the mistake of parking under those trees. His car appeared to have been painted with poop at the end of the day. There was more poop showing than paint, even on the sides. And don’t get me started on the windshield. Needless to say, he only made that mistake once.

Tonight the birds are especially saucy as I get to the PP. There’s electronic equipment shorting out all over the place. It’s like a sci-fi movie out here. They seem to be trying to tell me something, such as “Your night of deliveries has gone well so far, but don’t get cocky!” Ha…birds…cocky. Anyway, I wonder how many decibels of sound these winged nutjobs are producing, and how that compares to say, a plane or a Jethro Tull concert.

My next delivery takes me to an upper-class area with nice houses. There are a lot of these types of places in my delivery area, but also a lot of not-so-nice places. In my experience, that’s pretty typical. It’s hard to find a 6mile X 4mile rectangle that doesn’t have any trashy neighborhoods in it, especially in a place as fragmented and schizoid as Dallas. This will come up later on, believe me. So I get to this guy’s nice house, and it’s now almost completely dark outside. The house has no light on, because most people prefer to just order pizza and forget about the fact that they ordered it until it actually gets there, at which point they will turn on the light (and/or turn off the sprinkler, put away the rabid dog, get out the checkbook and hastily and illegibly write out a check, etc.). Of course, the houses on either side of my target house have their lights on, just to confuse me. Because I am a professional, I find this guy’s house, even without the light.

Which brings me to something I actually thought of last night on the topic of “why you should tip your pizza guy”. You might be saying to your crappy self, “What is the pizza guy doing to deserve this tip? He’s just bringing this pizza out to me, probably while listening to Radio Disney or something. It’s not actual work. I’ll tip him a very small amount.” This kind of thinking is anathema to me. Besides the fact that: gas prices are now at evil, Orwellian levels, and that the driver is taking the food to you so you can sit on your butt and download music illegally or watch the latest Will and Grace fiasco, and that often times that driver made and cut that pizza in addition to delivering it, and the fact that you are taking up the driver’s time, which in a rush is his most valuable asset, think about this: every night, the driver has to accurately locate as many houses and apartments as there are deliveries. You know how you go to mapquest.com and print out a map if you’re going someplace you aren’t familiar with? Drivers do that, only they have to keep the map completely in their heads. And when one has delivered as long as I have, one develops a head-map of all the streets in the area and the best way to get there. It really is more complicated than most people think. You should see the new drivers try to find houses in the middle of some of these neighborhoods. The streets are like mini-labyrinths, designed so that people like me can’t just drive from one side to the other in a straight line maniacally smacking kids into random front yards with my car’s grill. So tip the driver, because you live in a maze, rathead.

I ring the doorbell and don’t hear anything. Most, but not all, doorbells will produce a “ding” that’s audible from just outside the house. I ring it again after like 20 seconds, making sure that the doorbell is in fact not getting the customer’s attention. I would estimate that about 10% of doorbells just simply don’t work, and another 10% are functional but cosmetically broken in some way (this is especially true of the small circular plastic “button” doorbells, which one can put a hole in just by pushing too hard). After waiting another 10 seconds I am forced to do the activity at doors I hate the most: knocking. It hurts my sensitive knuckles, you see. At least this gets the customer’s attention. First, the light turns on (some people’s thoughts revolve around themselves to such an extent that they think the light exists solely to help them see, not the delivery driver), and moments later a middle-aged average man opens the door and finally gets his pizza.

Delivery 6 (No Light No Doorbell): Tip: $2.00, 17%.

I will pause at this point to explain that when I say, “Tip: $2.00, 17%,” the only thing in those quotation marks I really care about is how much money the customer gave me. Percent doesn’t help me at all. How well I do in a given night has nothing to do with how big my orders are. It has to do with how long it takes me to get there and how much money they give me, period. A two-pizza order really isn’t any different from a one-pizza order or a 4-pizza order. I still have to drive the same distance and do the same things when I get there. I am mentioning percentage because the customers can often be very percentage-minded, thinking of waitstaff (who get tipped almost solely based upon percentages, for semi-good reasons I don’t wish to get into here). Put it this way: If you live 5 miles away and order a small pizza that comes to 9 bucks and tip me a buck-25, I will want to kill you. If you live 1 mile away and order 4 large pizzas that come to $40, and tip me 4 bucks, I will be relatively happy. Especially if you’re hot.

No night of pizza delivery would be complete without a trip to UT-Dallas, which as I explained in Part One, is actually in Richardson. The UTD apartment complex is easily the most daunting in our delivery area. Its 67 buildings (when I started 3 years ago, it was only 58) were built in annoying circular “phases”, and consequently have wildly different layouts and numbering schemes. The main problem, like I said, is the phases. You have to know which phase your building is in, and exactly how to get to that phase. Remember, this is a University campus we’re talking about, so there are other, non-residential buildings all over the place. Most of the phases only have one entrance. After a while, you realize that it’s way more simple than it looks, because if you can somehow reach the right phase, it’s a breeze to find the building, since there are only 3-12 buildings to a phase. Finding a parking spot can be a hazard, though, especially since the rent-a-cops prowling campus are known overticketer busybodies, and will make you pay if you park in the handicapped spots, which never have a car in them. What a city. Like I said, this campus is in Richardson, which hates cars.

My next delivery is to this massive Gotham-like complex, to a person listed as “VJ” on the ticket. He is almost certainly a foreign student, not only because of the name but also because he ordered his hot buffalo wings with a side order of buffalo sauce. No American would order a combo as taste-bud-obliterating as that. It’s no secret to the pizza industry: Foreigners like the hot food. But the buffalo sauce is supposed to be for the chickenstrips, not for the already sufficiently buffaloed wings. I guess this is what you do when your taste buds have been burned off and you can’t taste normal food anymore.

I get to the third-floor apartment of Buffalo VJ, and I am slightly out of breath as I rap my already-tender knuckles on the steel door. I can see after he opens the door that he is indeed from the Indo-Pak region. I can also see that VJ is doing whatever the opposite of “living large” is these days – living small? I see no furniture save a folding chair and a small end-table, which has papers piled on it. In the back I see a computer and a monitor, both on nothing but the deathship-gray carpeting. This is a VJ who is living simply. I give him his charge slip and pizza, and he signs it and tells me to wait. He goes back into the room with the computer and searches around for something (presumably a tip, since he didn’t leave one on the charge slip). He comes back in a few seconds with a shiny new dollar bill for me. Remember earlier in the night, when I was getting good tips? I am no longer able to remember that. I thank him as I plot his untimely demise. Not really, but what recourse do I have? He has broken the social contract at my expense, and the social contract gives me no way to recover my money. I mean, it’s not like there’s a tipping court. I can’t file a grievance. But I will remember VJ and his Buffalo-on-Buffalo behavior, and next time I will have such a sense of urgency when it comes to arriving at his sparsely-furnished apartment. It’s the only thing I can do.

Of course, I should probably forgive him and move on, since he most likely comes from a culture that doesn’t know any better. So you see my dilemma – people hurt me and think they’re helping me, and I can’t do anything about it anyway.

Delivery 7 (VJ Buffalo): Tip: $1.00, >5%.

PP has just switched to Pepsi products, which means I get to actually enjoy the free soda I drink. I understand that there are Coke people out there, and those people have just as valid a point of view as I, but they’re wrong. Mountain Dew is the Man, and Mello Yello is just Sprite that’s been colored optical tennis-ball yellow.

Night is falling harder and harder on the delivery area; I know I will get to go home soon. But first, I have to take a double going south, which is known as the Bad Direction in our delivery area. Remember how I was telling you that there are a wide variety of socio-economic classes in any 6mile X 4mile rectangle? Well, where I deliver, south=trashy danger, for the most part. I have heard stories of 5 delivery drivers in our area getting robbed since I began working at this PP (most were Domino’s drivers – go figure), and all of those robberies occurred south of our location. There are some nice areas in the far Southwest corner of things, but it’s mostly a big melting pot of people who look like they’re up to something. And I’m telling you this as a white male who grew up with no Mexicans around, ok? I’ll admit it: 20 Mexicans sitting in a parking lot for no reason may not be dangerous, but it sure seems like it is. However, if Mexicans hung out inside their apartments, not only would it drive them crazy, it would probably be more dangerous (with less eyeballs out there). It’s like some sort of prejudiced catch-22.

My first delivery is merely on the way to a bad neighborhood. The guy inside the house answers the door in a Pink Floyd T-shirt. I think about running the idea I had earlier about Echoes being the definitive Pink Floyd song past him, but that would be counterproductive, especially since he’s clearly high. Maybe that would make him more insightful, I don’t know. His eyes are red, and he’s some sort of overbearded neo-hippie. He even has a ponytail. The two quotes from him that confirm that he is indeed on pot:

“Like, what’s in the bag, man?” (pointing at the bag the pizzas are in)

“Yeah, fer sure, man.” (after I thank him)

I would estimate that in my area, about 60% of the after-9pm deliveries I take are to humans that are drunk, high, or both. Among the pot-high, tips vary like they do among normal people, but the drunk almost always tip big. Perhaps this is because of latent guilt over being drunk, I don’t know. For this reason, the Pizza Deliverer’s Union is totally against Prohibition, but has no official stance on marijuana legislation. Off the record, though, whoa nelly -- Somebody pass them a joint.

Delivery 8 (Mr. Weed): Tip: $2.66, 17%.

My second delivery is to the apartment complex known to me and me alone as Mirascumte. For all the apartments I hate, I come up with a “clever” name for them, usually replacing a syllable with the word “scum”, because that’s the way I feel inside. I feel inside like these people outside of me are scum for ordering pizza and sending me to their own personal hell-hole.

When I have to drive to an apartment complex like Mirascumte, I always look at a map and plot a precise route directly to the apartment, one that minimizes my on-foot time. Mirascumte is very easy to deal with (despite it’s Shaq-sized speed bumps) because it has a back entrance that leads me directly to the apartment I’m going to, and I can get in and get out like Sydney Bristow in Alias, without the hot outfits or the guns or Sloane bothering me. As I park in accordance with my plan, I notice a sign by the steps: “No Loitering on Steps”. That’s either a good or bad sign, I’m not really sure which. On the one hand, they’re trying to deal with the loitering problem; on the other hand, there is a loitering problem. I go up to the apartment, careful not to call attention to myself. There’s nothing worse than being south of the PP and hearing an idiot’s voice calling “HEY PIZZA MAN!!” It is a little bit fun to ignore them, but it’s still an icepick to the skull.

<>The “scum” who answers the door has a buttchin. I have a friend from High School nicknamed “Buttchin”, and I wonder to myself what he’s doing now. This buttchinned guy does his part in making sure my tips even out to about $3 per, like they usually do. Mirascumte…grr.
<>
Delivery 9 (Buttchin): Tip: $1.62, 11%.

When a delivery driver gets back to the PP, he checks back in and his name goes into a “queue” based upon when the drivers got back. The driver on the top of the queue is “up”, and he has to take whatever delivery is on top. If he is to take a double or a triple, he needs to base it on the top delivery. When you are up, the top delivery is as inescapable as the proverbial death, taxes, and identity theft. I bring this up because when my next (and last) turn comes up, I go to the top of the delivery screen and staring me in the face is the one thing I don’t want to see – “Maham Rd.”

Maham Road has won many awards since its inception – most ghetto street in the already pretty ghetto surrounding area; most Hooches per square inch; most shadowy, dirty, and unsafe apartments on one street. It is lined from start to finish with the most sketchy apartments possible…

(excerpt from Maham Road: Why it Sucks, by me, copyright now.)

I see it up there, and I yell. I audibly yell, and groan, and generally act like a 12-year-old who doesn’t want to brush his teeth. There’s nowhere for me to hide – I must take this delivery. You should know, you people in the ghetto, what your ordering pizza does to the people who deliver to you. It crushes their wills and destroys their entire day. They could have been having the greatest day ever, and when they see your apartment at the top of that list, suddenly all that’s good in the world doesn’t matter anymore. Puppies, America, cheesecake, the NCAA Tournament – none of it matters. The universe has become a dark hand pointing at this one apartment. Do you enjoy making people feel crappy? You might protest this, saying, “It’s not my fault you’re prejudiced against me and my neighborhood – we have the right to order pizza if we want”. That’s really not the point, fool. We’re prejudiced against your neighborhood because of all the crime that happens there, and because of the horrible tips you give us. Get everyone there to stop doing crime and tipping badly, and we won’t groan when we see your delivery on the screen.

When I go to Maham Road at night, I activate my Stealth Delivery Procedure (patent pending), which consists of the following steps:

1. As soon as I can, I duck down a dark street and take the lighted carsign off my car and put it in the back seat. I take the cable that’s connected to my car’s battery and carefully place it along the driver’s door on the floor of the car.
2. Take off my baseball-style PP cap.
3. Drive to the delivery, trying to look as mean as possible without making any eye contact with anyone.
4. When I get to the complex (in this case, Copper Scum), I look for the building I’m going to, making sure I don’t arouse anyone’s suspicion by looking too intently.
5. Leave hat off and walk swiftly to delivery from the car. Run back to car after delivery.
6. Continue with the carsign and hat off until you clear the ghetto, and then duck down a dark street and place carsign exactly where it was.
7. Laugh to self about how PP has no idea you did this, then cry to self about the subpar tip you just got

A word about Copper Scum, the apartments I’m going to: dark. It’s a maze of twisting roads, dim lights, and massive trees. I think the apartments probably come with a manual on how to hide in the shadows. Even though I’m whining about it, the delivery goes off without a hitch, mostly thanks to the Stealth Delivery Procedures I’ve developed. I see some teenagers, but they don’t seem to be up to any specific no-good. The person at the apartment is high, and this time I get the added bonus of being able to smell secondhand pot smoke. There’s a baby crying in the background, and I wonder to myself if the babies can get high off of secondhand pot smoke, and what a high baby would be like.

Delivery 10 (Copper Scum): Tip: $ 0.94, 4%.

I get back to the delivery place and experience the best part of my night: The going home. I’m tired, cranky, relieved, and a little less poor. My stats for the end of the night:

I took 10 deliveries (about average for a Sunday), made $28.89 in tips (almost 16%) plus the $6.50 I get from the PP (they pay me 65 cents a delivery). I have $35 in-pocket. This night has been perfectly average in every way. Thanks for experiencing it along with me. If I have stopped just one person from getting a job as a Delivery Driver, it’s all been worth it.