Tag: sauce (Page 2 of 8)

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.

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So, since I left the Indian place, I have been at a Chinese place, then another pizza place, followed by a restaurant, and yet another pizza place. Why so many moves? I left the Chinese place to go work at a pizza place that offered my 60+ hours a week. The owner of that place turned out to be batshit crazy. She expected her ass to be kissed while you worked for her and no mistakes were ever let go. First off, mistakes happen. Second, ass-kissing is a separate fee. I wasn’t getting paid to do that. She actually fired me because I took an order that was sitting longer before one that was just out of the oven simply because the one just out of the oven was closer. Her logic was flawed. Instead of two late deliveries I got one there on time. Whatever, she was a bitch. So after that I took a job at a place in Milford, but that owner flaked also. She had an employee come back looking for work and gave him my job. Whatever, she has no class. Right now I’m working at a corporate restaurant, of which I won’t mention the name. They might find my blog, one of my crazier fans might try to cause trouble and call them, etc. P.S. I should say those of you who are that small-minded to call a place I work at to try to get me fired because you don’t like me can really go fuck yourselves. It’s never worked, but what if it did? Would you really want me trying to do that to you? If you don’t like what I say, don’t fucking read my blog you dumbasses. Or grow a pair of balls and tell me you want to meet me to tell me in person why you don’t like my blog instead of trying to stop me from making an honest wage. People like you should take a long walk off a short pier with the waters below filled with hungry Great White sharks. You’re useless trolls with nothing better to do. To you, I say piss off.
To everyone else, keep reading and enjoying 🙂

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.

“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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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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Do you people understand the difference? I had an 85 Ford Tempo that I could drive fast. 85 or so if I pushed it. I also had a 95 Mazda Protege that I could drive fast when I wanted to. I currently have a 2008 Subaru Impreza WRX. That’s a fast car that I don’t have to push to go fast. It’s just fast. Like pocket rocket fast. The reason I ask is I see a lot of you on the roads putting along, but when you see me, suddenly, you see red. I see the car lurch forward as you punch the gas to try and beat me to the next light. More often than not, I don’t do anything other than continue to drive. Just like when I’m doing 85 in the fast lane on the highway and a Ford Expedition comes flying up behind me, I change lanes. What annoys me is you were in the middle lane till I passed you. Then you felt the need to prove something.
One of these days I’m going to follow you, and when you stop, I’m going to ask if it felt good, and do you feel better for making it to the next whatever before me. Then I’m going to ask you if you want to go somewhere and race for cash. Or even just for bragging rights. Most of the time, it’s men who do this crap to me, so if it’s who’s penis is bigger, we can skip racing and just unzip and see who’s is bigger. I particularly like that idea because no matter what’s under the hood of your car, you’re kinda stuck if your Willie is tiny. At the end of the day, I got my car because I like it. Not to race those of you with something to prove. So go find someone else to bother, see a plastic surgeon and find out if penis enlargement works yet, find a hobby. I don’t care, just please, please: stop pissing me off.

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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I’m not sure why owners do this: having a delivery fee that doesn’t go to the driver really fucks us over. First of all, no other employee is paid from any sort of fee. Not the bartender, not a waitperson, no a phone person, not even a cook. So why then is the driver’s pay supplemented by a service we’re largely paying for ourselves by having the car, putting our own gas in it, taking care of all the repairs, and so forth? No other employee has to do that, and yet we’re partially being paid by that fee. Most places give something for gas, but it’s never even close to what it should be. It should be the IRS mileage rate, especially since most employers try to be slick and deduct the mileage rate, even though they never paid us for it. That rate in CT this year is 55 cents a mile. So if the delivery were 18 miles round trip, and yes, we really do take deliveries that far, then my “gas money” for the trip should be $9.90. Instead, it’s usually something along the lines of 50 cents to a dollar, tops.
Here’s the bigger problem: customers see that money and assume it goes to us. Often it’s between $1.50 and $2. Of that we might get 30%. So the employer is making an additional 70% profit on that fee we provided. So if your order were $30,a good tip would be around $4.50 Some people will deduct that delivery charge and give us maybe $3 instead. So we wind up with $3 to $3.50 for a $30 order on a trip that took an half an hour with traffic. Now you have to deduct what we used in gas, and we’ll skip the wear and tear. On my car, I get 20 miles a gallon. So that’s almost a gallon of gas to take that delivery. So it cost me $4 to bring you the delivery that you gave me $3 for. So I lost a dollar right there. If i get 50 cents from my employer I only lost 50 cents for the delivery. If my hourly pay is $7, in that half an hour I made $3.50, but since I lost 50 cents, now I only made $3 for that half hour.
If you do the math and figure out averages, it can really piss you off because if every situation were like that, we would make $6 an hour after gas, making the job just not worth it. It’s the good customers who understand all that, that make it worth doing most of the time. The people who give a $10 tip for a $30 order because they know they live 9 miles from the store. Or the people who give a little extra when it’s raining, or snowing, or really hot or cold. Those people bring up the average and our hourly pay will go way up.
That doesn’t excuse the owners who screw us over with delivery charges we don’t get 100% of, especially the ones who give you nothing for it. And it doesn’t excuse the customers who know how far they are or what the weather is, but are too cheap to give what they should. The example I used above is a high percentage. We should get 15% at every delivery, the same as waiters do. We have much more risk, and way more expenses than they do. The sad truth of the matter is a lot of you won’t tip us 15%, or even 10%. Those of you who are like that average between 3% and 5% which is just pathetic. We remember you, and we take your orders last. We also don’t go the extra mile, or are extra nice. We tried it before and it seems like you’re in league with the owner to price us out of work. Which is fine, we can find other jobs, but that means you’ll have to get off your lazy asses and go pick up your food.

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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So at this new place orders don’t get assigned to drivers as they go out, like they should, and I really should have continued my tradition of writing down my runs and separating my tips, but I didn’t. So a few orders get mixed up tonight. We get through most of them, when the owner comes in. She’s got to get right in the middle of it and try to figure it out, but she’s also a victim of OCD and ADD and gets really mean when she’s frazzled.

The first thing she does is try to get me to pay twice for a ticket. I had just given the other guy the money for it and gotten my change. Then she asks for it and I say “we just did it”. She’s like “how much did you give me?” and I say “twenty”. So she’s like “I gave you $2 change?” Umm, I think so, but to be fucking honest, I think it was the other guy who gave me the change. I really can’t remember. I just finished 10 1/2 busy hours. All I remembered was paying for it, not who I handed it to.

Then she says, “You had all credit card orders?” to which I say, “All but two.” She actually says “I find that suspicious. I have people here who can tell me where you went and for what.” What the fuck? I did all credit card orders, except those two in cash. Ask any waiter or delivery person, sometimes it’s all cash. Sometimes it’s all credit. It’s certainly not fucking suspicious. There was no money short, so what’s the big fucking deal? I start to try to explain that to her and she says, “I can see where this is going to be a problem. Every time there’s an issue, you have to give me your life story to explain it.” That’s pretty fucking rude and totally not true.

Time to start looking for another job, I guess.

The Driver (Adam Smith)

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When the Indian place, Thali, ended delivery and left me out of a job, I got a job a few days later delivering Chinese food for Little Kitchen across the street. Little Kitchen didn’t really have enough hours for me, and I lucked out and found a job delivering at a pizza place in Westport, full-time. I can’t say for sure yet how this new job is until I start banging out some actual deliveries in Westport. They do a LOT of catering orders, really far away, which take a lot of time, and kind of kills your tip potential compared to if you took 10 deliveries locally in that time. I’m hopeful, though. I’ll write back in a few days when I see how the weekend goes.

The Driver (Adam Smith)

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Most of these are in Westport, you know, one of the wealthiest towns on the planet.

More cheap Westport people (fuckers)
1) 56 Coleytown Road
2) 292 North St
3) 10 Reichert Circle
4) 11 Northfield Drive ($3 tip on $80 order)
5) 123 Greens Farms Road
6) 16 North Pasture Road
7) 20 Stoneboat Road
8) 2 Windy Hill Road
9) 44 Pumpkin Hill Rd ($5 on $75)
10) 124 River Road (nothing on a $35 order)
11) 6A Cob Drive ($6 tip for $105 order)
12) 72 Ludlow ($1.50 on a $25 order)
13) 38 Richmondville Ave ($4 on $100 order)
14) 1 Charcoal Lane ($5 on $90)
15) 2 Murvon Place ($3 on $70 order)
16) 25 Saugatuck Ave (Store forgot slip, so they gave me ZERO tip)
17) 2 Rustic Lane ($5 on $100)
18) 11 Sturges Highway ($5 on $93)
19) 1 Hickory Drive ($3 on $65)
20) 89 Sturges Highway ($3 on $55)
21) 162 Lyons Plains Road, Weston ($5 on $85)
22) 71 Old Hill Road (no tip for $60 order)
23) 236 Hillspoint Road ($5 for $135)
24) 2 Snowflake Lane ($5 on $83)
25) 89 sturges highway. Went twice, $4 tip on $63 order and they live in a mansion.

26) 5 east meadow road. $24.38 paid $40 told me i could keep the 62 cents.

27) 4 broadview rd. $5 tip on $145 order.

28) 4 jennings court. $40. Zero tip.

29) 10 sylvan lane. Being from another country doesn’t excuse 5% tips on big orders.

30) 23 sound view farm rd weston. You live 17 miles round trip and gave me a $3 tip.

31) 11 northfield. $4 tip on an $88 order makes you look cheap. That’s less than 5%. And you do it all the time in your huge house. You tip worse than people in bridgeport.

32) 22 hill crest lane weston. 22 miles round trip in a storm. $6 tip on $50 order in a mcmanson makes you assholes. I spent $4.25 in gas to make $1.75 and it took an hour. Losers.

33) 32 compo parkway $58 order ZERO tip.

34) 15 parsell lane. $101 order, $5 tip. Cheap.

35) 34 old redding rd weston. $55 order, $5 tip. 20 miles.

36) 7 silverbrook, $6 on $88 order.

37) 84 easton rd. $73 order, zero tip.

38) 28 timber mill lane weston. $5 tip for $125 order. Congratulations you cheap fucks. That’s 4%. Losers.

39) 6 swale rd norwalk. $2.25 on a $24 order and kinda far. Cheap.

40) 78 lords highway east weston. 26 miles round trip for $5 on a $25 order makes you cheap. I spent that much in gas.

41) 8 overlook. $5 on $100. Come on.

42) 4 hales rd. 22 cents on $29.78. Assholes.

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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Coming home, this guy flies up behind me about 5 feet back. I have traffic in front if me, so why move? I dump it from 5th to 3rd, no brakes. Scared the shit out of him and i get high beams. He finds an opening, flies way out to the slow lane, and barrels up to tailgait the next guy. Two more cars do this as i get closer home. One almost bites it driving the breakdown lane. Mind you, I’m doing 80 WITH traffic. These guys are doing well over 100. And in crappy cars. Why? To save 5 minutes? Or is it to compensate? Slow down morons. Time and place. Cause me to wreck, if you’re wrecked too and I can walk, I’m gonna kick the shit out of you till EMS gets there.

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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