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Month: January 2012

On demand or not?

Thinking up these titles when you’re tired is kinda hard. I had a title before, when I went out for a smoke, but then life happened, and I forgot. Just like I forget spelling and grammar. But they say if you’re bad at that stuff you’re a genius, so I must be like a super-genius. lol. Yeah, I do those, too. Anyway, on to the title topic. The new job is okay, business is starting to pick up, but the guy who owns it could really do some things to help it along. It’s been open for a few years now and has a decent following. It’s a brick oven place, which is great pizza, but no one will know it’s great unless you shout to the world that you’re there. He hasn’t even put a “We Deliver” sign in the window because he thinks it will look tacky or something. He asks for a lot of advice and I always tell him, “I can’t tell you what works, but I can tell you all the different ways I fucked up my place.” The problem is, he does some of the same stuff. If he relied on delivery, he’d be in trouble. He has a pretty good following for sit-down and pick-up, but I’m of the opinion that once you start something, you finish it. There’s nothing worse for anyone working for tips anywhere than sitting around waiting for customers. Even bad tips pales in comparison. I mean think about it: we make on average around $6 an hour. We rely on those tips to make it worthwhile. At a busy place on a good day you could easily average $20 an hour or more. My best weekly average was about $25 an hour. I mean we’re not talking lawyer pay here, but how many jobs do you know that you can make $1200 a week without many more skills than customer service and driving? There aren’t too many.
Saturday I took ten deliveries. I think I made around $40 in tips and another $10 in gas money. So $50. Add my pay for the day, $57 and you get $107 for 9.5 hours of work. So the average is way down for that day. Still, six days a week means at least $600 at the end of the week. Then the problem is buying gas, coffee, cigarettes, etc. It really helps if i do two to three times the amount of deliveries in a day. At least. Ten deliveries is okay for a Monday or Tuesday, but the rest of the week should be between twenty and forty deliveries all day. Split it, take thirty: if I average $3.50 a delivery in tips, that’s $105 in tips, plus $30 in gas, plus $57 in pay. Now you get $193 for 9.5 hours of work. That’s $20.32 an hour. The end of that week I would have $1,158. That’s $60,216 a year. That’s not too bad, especially in this economy. It also makes it a lot easier to budget money. People think it’s easy to just put the money in the bank, but they go to work and go home. We drive work around all day. Our cars are our offices. We need gas. We need food and drinks and such. Yes, it would make a certain amount of sense to go to BJs and get stuff in bulk, or even Restaurant Depot, for those of you who know of it, but it’s all easier said than done. Like how many of you keep your New Year’s resolutions? Yeah, I don’t either. I want to quit smoking. I want to start working out. I want to learn how to save money instead of being a dumbass with my money. I want to be more respectful of my fellow human beings (I’m not rude to them, I just pretty much ignore them if I can). I want to do more things that are living like skiing, ice skating, going to the casinos, camping, traveling, maybe taking cooking classes, get back to learning Spanish and French, and German, too. I want to finish my degree and get another. I want to write a book. There are so many things I want to do. Making sure I put money in the bank just seems to fall short of everything else. Ironically (or maybe not since I don’t get how to use that all the time), a girl was keeping me in line with a lot of the stuff, but she’s caught a rather terminal case of being a neomaxizoomdweebie. Not really terminal, but everything sure seems to be life or death with she and I and we’re not talking as of right now. Such is life, right?
So, back to my original thought: I need people to call so I can present them with excellent service so they tip me well so I can go spend lots of money. That pretty much sums it all up for me tonight. More later.

The Driver (Adam Smith)

© Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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Week one is finished!

So, today is my day off. Blissfully. I’m horrible at going to sleep on time, and so, many nights I’m awake at 3 or 4 in the morning. That line was kind of an oxymoron, but you know what I mean, right? Anyway, I don’t really like working 6 days a week, but that’s the kind of work week in this industry. My new boss actually tried to get me to work 7 days, but I said no. Sunday’s not the ideal day off, but it is a good one. Hopefully when business picks up, he’ll be able to get more drivers and I can have Monday off also. I like the Sunday Monday thing because I get to go out Saturday night, sleep all day Sunday, then Monday I can do anything I’d have to at a business or bank or whatever. I slept till 1:30 today. That was nice. Then I got interrupted being lazy by a friend who wanted help with laundry. lol. That wound up with me doing my laundry, and I had like two-week’s worth. See, I had a list of things I wanted to do today. Working on the book was one of them. I’ve finished everything I need to do to write the book. All I need to do is organize my notes and start writing. I expect the writing part o take a few weeks, then it will be onto the next task, which is printing out a bunch of copies and submitting it. I have a friend with access to one of those corporate printers, so if I finish the book before she finds another job, I can get some free copies of my book. Otherwise, I’ll have to go to a print shop and pay a pretty penny. Why you can’t submit these things electronically in this day and age, I have no idea.
Also on my schedule for today is to work on a website to do computer repair, web design, etc. I want to do a Living Social deal for that, but they make you jump through a bunch of hoops to get approved. But, if they do approve it and if I do get a deal listed, I could find myself with a ton of work in that area, which is a lot more along the lines of what I like to do than delivering pizza. Lastly, I want to do my tax return today. I need that money ASAP, and right now the only thing stopping me from getting it is filling that whole bit out. I’m sure I’ll get to it later. P.S. I hate the keyboard I’m using right now. It’s like it was made in Bizzaro land. It’s just a hair smaller than normal ones, so I keep messing up keys.

The first three days at work I passed out fliers and managed one delivery each of those days. The fourth day I took two. The fifth day I took four. The sixth day I took ten, so business is obviously picking up now that menus are out. I’m sure tomorrow will be a little slow, but maybe not. It’s nice to be back to making like $700 a week. That’s for sure. I mean that’s not a lot of money, but when you go from basically unemployed (or working very part-time) making like $200 a week to more than tripling that, it gives you some room to breathe. You know? More later.

The Driver (Adam Smith)

© Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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Just a quick new year post

I know it’s been a few months, and I always mean to try to post one a day, but you can see how well that goes. lol. Anyhoo, I was working at a chain restaurant for a little while doing corporate deliveries. The tips were great since the orders were always for a few hundred dollars and they added ten percent automatically, but the hours sucked. My average day would be to hours, tops. Still, I could easily make $100 in two hours. The problem was that didn’t happen every day. Some days I came in, had one delivery, and wound up with $20. But a job is a job, and it beats sitting at home all day looking for a full-time gig. But an offer from a place nearby finally came and I accepted. I have to admit, I didn’t think it was for real. The guy was talking about starting in a few weeks, and I’m the kind of person that wants to start now. This place has been in business for 16 years, and has quite a following, so I expect now that they’re delivering business should be good. It’s a brick oven place with pizza on par with Modern in New Haven, if you’re familiar with that. Really thin, really good sauce, great cheese, and that oh-so-nice brick oven finish. I love it!
So now I’m working Monday through Saturday from 11:30 to 10 or so. So just showing up to work makes me enough money to pay a few bills. The tips pay for gas and a few more bills 🙂 This isn’t a long-term goal by any means. I have other things I’m working on, like the book, and other books, selling some stuff on Ebay and other sites, as well as trying to get back into the computer thing. I also plan on going back to school shortly to finish my degree in Computer Science, and possibly even following that up with a master’s in the same. Gotta do something, right? I just turned 39. Time to get back into the game of life. I may even try another pizza place of my own in the not to distant future. More later….

The Driver (Adam Smith)

© Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com, 2009. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Adam Smith and drivershout.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

Page copy protected against web site content infringement by Copyscape

Creative Commons License
“Kick Rocks” Pizza Delivery Nightmares by Adam Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License

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