Working With The Idiots

I want to preface this by saying I enjoy my job as a pizza driver and there isn't anyone at work that I dislike. Having said that, almost everything that anyone could do tonight to screw me up was done.

I drove for 8 hours, took 16 deliveries, drove 64 miles, and made $30 in tips. I also made a rare $1 tip on a pick-up order.

Now on to what went wrong. Our POS system requires the driver to "dispatch" and "return" each order. This timestamps the order within the system and calculates the oven time and the delivery time. Let's say the order was entered at 6:00 PM. The driver dispatched at 6:15 and returned at 6:35. Travel time of 20 minutes gets cut in half and the order is stamped as delivered at 6:25, or 25 minutes after the order was entered.

Several employees (including managers) don't understand how this works and think that if the driver isn't back 30 minutes from the order entry time, the order is late. Delivery on-time percentages are calculated and compared from store to store. Some managers will "return" a driver when he isn't really back, to make their numbers look better.

This upsets me to no end. First off my on-time numbers are always good to begin with. Second, returning a driver early is a lie. Also, returning a driver early makes it difficult to edit or void the order, if the customer found a coupon or if the order was a fake order. Finally, returning drivers out of order adds confusion, as the computer can't be used to mark which driver returned first (and thus which driver is up next).

Well tonight, somebody was returning drivers and there was mass confusion on who would be up next. At one point driver Chris accidentally took an order ahead of me when it should have been my turn before him.

Later on somebody actually returned me, which at that time was the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak. It happened to be on an order where I was shorted 5 cents by the customer. Now 5 cents is no big deal but there's no reason I should be expected to cover for the customer. The order should have been discounted by the store but it was too late.

At that point I stopped dispatching myself and returning myself, figuring if somebody else thought they should do it, I would let them try to figure out which deliveries I was taking.

The cooks also got into the act, forgetting cinnamon sticks on one order and making a supreme rather than a super supreme on another. This is bad enough, but both of these times the mess up would have went nicely as a double, saving us drivers both time and gas (money).

The phone people screwed by taking the same bad address twice. First they put the address as "19 STREET", as in house number 19 on STREET. We called back to try to get the address right an no one answered so the order was voided. Later they called back and this time gave a valid street address on Douglas. Except for the fact that their house was about 1 mile past the end of our delivery area. Desiree took the order and they shorted her $1 because they thought that was all they should pay due to the late pizza.

The address was marked and we will NOT be going there again, if I can help it.

Later I arrived at a house and asked for $24.84, the guy said he had paid by credit card online. I called the store and sure enough, we had neglected to transfer that info from our internet computer to our ordering computer. I apologized to the guy and told him I was working with a bunch of idiots tonight.

New manager James even got into the act in a very minor way. He was on cut-and-pack and missed a "well done" note, but I caught it before leaving with the food, so that item was put back in to bake a little longer.

To top it all off, my customers also joined in. Half of them tipped $1 or less. One of them left their sprinkler on (in the dark) for me to walk through.

The worst was the woman who answered the door, telling me her husband was getting the money. I thought she meant upstairs. She meant at the bank. I waited in their driveway for about 10 minutes!

I'm sure I could say more but it's almost 3 AM and I'm bushed. So I'll just note that I was so upset for a while that someone called in manager Nick (on his day off) to try to calm me down. Nick went for a ride and told me about his failed romance, and it actually helped.

Good news of the night ... there was a huge dine-in group of about 20-30 people. Both waitresses, Catherine and Jeanette, served them. The diners then gave each of them a $50 bill as a tip! WOW!