I had started a series of sharing my delivery night adventures over at my DinnerPics blog and have decided to continue them over here. Some background info… I’m 19 years old, second year Graphic Design student at my local college. I work for a pizza joint delivering pizzas Thursday and Saturday nights. I’ll work in store sometimes on Friday night if they need me. I’ve decided to share me stories since well, some don’t know exactly what goes on during a delivery driver’s night. At my place of employment nothign is paid for except my wage, this means insurance and gas and everything else is paid by me.

You’ll notice some night are good, others are bad, and some are just boring. Which will it be tonight?

Today is Saturday and also happens to be St. Patrick’s Day. What am I going to be doing to celebrate? That’s right, working. Work begins at 4:00 PM so I leave my place at around 3:45, I get there about 5 minutes early. There’s always dishes needed to be washed, dried and put away, so that’s what I do when I get there. The night begins off slow, not really any orders coming in until around 4:30 and 5:00. No one was really sure how busy (or not) it was going to be tonight. Being St. Patrick’s Day that means either everyone is at home and partying or will be away. We find throughout the night that everyone must’ve been away as it wasn’t busy as expected. The weather tonight was all right, it was cold and windy but bearable. My first delivery went good, the person didn’t live to far away and was able to get about a $2 tip.

I’ll try to skip the boring parts of my night since tonight was slow, it’ll be most of my story.

Later in the night as more orders start coming in I get an out of town delivery, this means I get to charge a delivery charge (in town is free). I was feeling nice and gave them a good deal on the delivery charge. I decided to charge them only about 2-3 dollars for delivery when it should have been closer to about 5-6 dollars. They pretty much give me exact change and no tip, luckily I get to keep out-of-town delivery charges. Other deliveries of the night go a little better, someone was nice enough to leave a five dollar tip, other decided to leave absolutely zero. How they are able to work around this is by coming to the store and ordering and paying for it there, that way they make sure that I get nothing. I can’t understand why people think it’s necessary to not leave anything, hell even a dollar is something. Sure they get to save themselves a buck or two if they don’t tip but, when you’re ordering 30-50 bucks worth of food the least you could do is give me a little extra change. I could’ve gotten into an accident or have my car quit on me or something like that while bringing them their food… and by getting nothing in return is like a slap in the face.

When I get back to the store there are more dishes to do. Every pan that a pizza is cooked on I have to wash, dry, butter, and put away. I’m able to this pretty quickly now so it’s not too big of a pain. More orders start coming in I have to start helping to make them since the order bills are piling up and the phones are ringing. Another 3 delivery orders come in one after the other, this means another three will be going out at the same time. This goes on for awhile until it starts dieing down around 8:00 PM.

Fast forward to the end of the night.
Time to start cleaning and sweeping the floors. Since it’s completely dead we start out cleaning early. I’m able to get everything swept up good and ready for mopping when the time comes. I start to mop the floors just before 11 (we close at 12). I start at the back where we make everything and work my way up. Someone decides to call and order just after I finish mopping. I mop again after the manager is done making the order. This order is a delivery, I look at the address and the place it literally about 3 houses down from where the store is….lazy. Once I delivered it though they left a good tip so I was happy with that. Back to the store to finish my mopping I go. Once all is said and done it’s time to count up what I owe and get paid. I did just under 280 dollars worth of deliveries, that’s low for a Saturday. I managed to walk away with about 50 dollars worth of tips which is great for the amount in sales.

I know you’re thinking, “WTF is this guy on about?” but hey, it’s just before 2AM and I’m tired :P. This has not been one of my most exciting nights, if you can tell, and actually managed to read through the whole thing. But, it all just depends on the night and what sort of crap people decide to put on me.

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