Easter Bunny Enlists Help Of Santa's Reindeer

I don't know if that is true or not but here in Northern Ohio we have enough snow that it wouldn't be a bad idea!

First off, I decided that my Good Friday novel was almost unreadable so I added some section titles. If you gave up on yesterday's post, you may want to give it another chance. I will try to use some section titles from now on when appropriate in my longer posts.

Reruns
First the reruns, I had 2 tonight, for the 2nd night in a row. Both were for pick-up orders who got home and realized we did not give them their complete order. One was for 5 cheesesticks and the other was for a 2-liter of Pepsi. The cheesesticks order actually tipped me $1 for bringing them out. A tip on a rerun is very rare but also very cool.

Asking For Tips
Next, the tips. I had a delivery where the total was $29.56. The woman came to the door with $34, handed me $30, and was kind of waving the other $4 around in the air like she wasn't sure what to do. "Is that for me?" I finally asked. She started to hand me $2 and then said "Well it's their money, here." and gave me all $4.

I'm guessing she was a grandmother babysitting and the $34 was left by the parents. I've never asked "Is that for me?" before but it seemed like the right thing to do in the situation as the woman appeared to be genuinely confused.

The other order was a credit card order. The woman signed the slip and handed it back to me, leaving the tip and total blank. "Could you fill in the total please? You don't want to leave it blank, you never know what somebody might write. It's for your own protection."

This is a line I've used many, many times and tonight it got me a $2 tip. Many people will pretend to ignore the tip but not as many are bold enough to write an actual zero on the tip line.

Bigger Tips Late At Night?
Do tips increase later in the night? They did for me tonight. I took 23 deliveries. Of the first 14, my biggest tip was $4.44 and I only had 1 other over $3.00. Of the final 9 deliveries, 4 of them were over $5! I really think the best way to make money delivering pizza is to be the closing driver.

Popcorn!
Oh and I almost forgot my most amusing delivery of the night. It was to a friend of Steve's who works with him at Rent-A-Center. The guy invited me in and as I walked in through 2 layers of plastic hanging over the door, I saw his wife crawling around on her hands and knees under the dining room table. I'm pretty sure she was trying to keep a cat from running outside.

We chatted a little about Steve. Brian commented that Steve, who works 2 jobs, was like James Brown, the hardest working man in show business. The wife asked if I remembered the side of banana peppers and Brian admitted that he forgot to ask for them. Then Brian tipped me $5 and his wife tipped me a bag of popcorn from her work, Poppees Popcorn!

When I got back I made sure to put a note on their address to always bring a side of banana peppers. Drivers like to take care of good customers like that!

New Manager
We had a new manager closing tonight that I have never closed with before, and I had to help him count his cash, as he was afraid he was short, but he found some more coins in the safe and he ended up just $4.69 short for the day.

Nightly Totals
I worked 8 hours, took 23 runs, drove 83 miles, and made $57 in tips (not counting the popcorn). A very good night!