Long Day

I was scheduled to work 10:00 - 4:30 yesterday. Not really all that long a shift, but a busy one. On Fridays it involves "putting away the truck", i.e. rotating old stock and shelving new stock that arrives that day, washing dishes, all the usual driving prep jobs like stocking soda and folding pizza boxes and, of course, delivering pizzas. It was hot for Green Bay. Like, 90 degrees most of the day. Hot weather generally means increased deliveries and sure enough, deliveries were pretty busy. Kids eat free at the afternoon buffet, so that was busy too, which doesn't directly involve me, but means a huge amount of dishes.

I ended up going home a little after 5:00. Still not exactly a long shift, but it was a busy, busy, busy, work-your-butt-off seven hours. I hadn't finished dishes yet, hadn't even started soda and boxes. The only reasons I got to leave when I did is that other drivers arrived to work their butts off and I guess since I was on call from 7:00 - 9:00 the manager, Kayla, decided I should get a break before possibly being called back in.

Well, things must have slowed down enough that the scheduled drivers could handle it just fine. When I called about 6:45, Kayla said I could stay home. I was so happy. Becky and I planned to watch Flight Plan, eat some popcorn. It was going to be a nice relaxing evening. About 8:45, as we were getting Tabby in bed, I had just commented how much I was looking forward to it when the phone rang. The closing driver had fallen, injured his knee and was going to the emergency room. Could I come in and finish his shift? Uhg. So I went back in to work from 9:00 - 2:00.

I am so looking forward to getting an actuary job.

Pizza Delivery and the Law of Large Numbers

Random pizza delivery thoughts because that's what I'm thinking today.

Being the "on call" driver hasn't been a big deal most nights because mostly it hasn't been busy enough for the "on call" driver to come in. Both last night and tonight, though, I was called in. Which is a good thing. I like the hours. Tonight was a lot of work. I was on call from 6-9pm. At about 5pm, while Jackson and I were helping an older lady from church carrying her Christmas decorations from her basement upstairs, the manager calls me in. So I hurry up and finish, skipped dinner and got in about 5:45. Tonight was the first major snowstorm of the year. Roads were awful, drivers were sliding all over, it was cold and we were very, very busy. I finally got home about 10:45.

Keeping track of some things while delivering has been a wonderful confirmation of the Law of Large Numbers. That's the law in probability theory that states that if you perform a number of trials, say n trials, for example, the average result as n approaches infinite will approach the calculated expected value. Which basically means things average out over time. The classic example is tossing coins. If you flip a coin 3 times, you may get 3 heads in a row, i.e. 100% heads, 0% tails. In fact, it's likely enough that if you try a bunch of tests of 3 coin flips each, it will eventually happen. However, the longer you flip the coin, the closer you will get to 50% heads and 50% tails. If you could flip the coin forever, you would get exactly 50% heads and 50% tails.

I average 3 deliveries per hour. $2.50 tip per delivery. Just under 4 miles per delivery. I understand how averages work, so I expect that some days vary from those numbers. But over time, that's what I get. And I'm very impressed with how close I get to those numbers pretty much every day. Today for example, in my five hours at work I took 15 deliveries and drove 55 miles. I would have expected to get $35-$40 dollars, but today of all days, weather and driving conditions notwithstanding, I was stiffed five times. I only got $29 in tips. That's what a $.50 drop in the tip average means. It means I got paid about $1.50 per hour less than normal. That's a big deal on low income wages.

Do a little math because, you know, math is fun and all. Assume the other 10 deliveries were normal, which they seemed to be. Recognize that the resulting $2.90 per delivery average occurs only if you exclude all tips of $0. We can calculate that, normally, I could expect to not get tipped about 2 deliveries out of 15. We just need a theorem defining some number, X > 2 that is considered to suck. If 5 > X, we can claim to have mathematically proven that tonight, indeed, did suck. I don't have such a theorem, though, so you're just going to have to take my word for it.

On the upside, it was a beautiful night. The air literally seemed to glow. I assume it has to do with the city lights reflecting off the new fallen snow, or off dense, low hanging clouds, maybe some combination of the two. Or I don't know. Something like that. In any case, it was so bright out that I could see address numbers even when porch lights were left off. That was just kind of a corollary benefit, though. What was really impressive was driving through the city with that new fallen snow radiance. It was very, very pretty.

Requests from the delivery guy

Just two quick things.

First, if you order a pizza (or whatever) delivered at night, please turn on your porch light.

Second, some night when you have a spare moment, turn on your porchlight, get in your car, pull onto the street in front of your house and locate your address numbers. If they are hidden by your flag or in the shadows under your eave or in any other way not clearly visible, identify a location on where they would be visible and some time in the near future, put them there.

That is all. Thank you.

Happy Labor Day

The rest of the world celebrates it on May 1st. International Workers' Day, a celebration of the common laborer and the contributions of the labor movement. It had a hard time gaining traction in the US, though. Too much of a commie holiday. Until we had a president who wanted to make nice with labor unions and pushed for the holiday, but celebrated American style. Instead of on May Day, like the rest of the commie world, we'd celebrate at the end of summer. By giving all the white collar guys the day off and telling the blue collar laborers to get back to work. If they're union bastards, they get time-and-a-half and can consider themselves lucky.

Sorry if I seem kinda' cynical today.

I was scheduled to work 10:30am to 8pm. And, no, not as a lucky union bastard. It was busy. Very, very busy. Normal work day? With steady deliveries for 8ish hours? 20ish deliveries. Today? 35. So busy we ran out of hand tossed dough. We ran out of stuffed crust. We ran out of breadsticks. And the whole day we were somewhat understaffed. You want to know why? You ready for this? Because today, of all days, they were worried about labor costs.

I'm not kidding. I didn't make that up.

I ended up working just over 10 hours without a break (there was never time for a break) and with about enough food for an anorexic teen girl. They still shouldn't have let me go. There were dishes, no exaggeration, piled up to my face waiting to be washed. And that was just the beginning of the clean up that had to be done. And delivery orders still being called in. I mean, they should have let me, specifically, go home. But they really needed at least one more employee there instead of me.

Paycheck

Pizza Hut has a new way to pay employees. Instead of a paycheck, we get a card that works like a debit card or credit card. Our wages are put into an account the card draws from when we use it. I thought it sounded pretty slick up until the part about a service fee every time I use the card.

Fortunately, there's a way to get our pay direct deposited into a checking account. I just have to go to some website and enter all the right code words. So I'm trying to figure that out this morning.

Floods

I was scheduled to work at 5pm yesterday. So at about 4:58 I pulled up to the corner of Main and Mason, about 1/4 mile up from Pizza Hut, and traffic was backed up from that light all the way to the next light up on Mason. Gah. But I happened to be about middle of the pack, right next to the Walgreen's parking lot at the corner. So I quickly turned in the Mason Street entrance, cut through and noticed as I pulled out the Main Street entrance that traffic was backed up because of a police barricade blocking Main Street. Oops, I looked down the road towards Pizza Hut and realized they were barricading off Main Street because it was flooded out about 1/2 way between the corner and Pizza Hut.

There were two cars right at the driveway entrance to Pizza Hut submerged up over their hoods. A river flowed across the parking lot and flowed away down Main Street. There was no way I could drive there. I literally would have had to swim to the store.

So instead, I returned home, called in and explained that I wasn't there yet because I couldn't get there. "Don't worry about it," said the manager on duty, "We're closing for the night. Just waiting for the water to subside so we can clean up before heading out."

This morning I was scheduled to work 10:30AM. When I arrived, there were puddles all over the parking lot, debris all over the property. Two managers had arrived earlier in the morning to continue cleaning everything up. Dine-in remained closed until about 5PM, and the morning was real slow, so I spent most of my time helping to clean things up until deliveries started coming in regularly about 2PM.

Of course we talked about what it had been like at the store yesterday. Apparently there was about 4 inches of standing water throughout. One of our waitstaff tried to drive in when the water was only 1/2 way up her car door, without considering that our parking lot was a depression. As soon as she started to pull in, her car sank. One of the drivers swam out to help her out of the car. By the time she had climbed out the window, water was about up to the cars roof. One of the customer's cars was entirely submerged.

It was crazy.

Exciting work day

I headed out on a double delivery today - taking two homes' orders. A couple minutes on the road and I found traffic at a dead stop at the intersection of I43 North and Manitowoc Road. A couple cars were pulled off the side, everyone else stopped in their lanes, even a couple cars in the intersection itself.

Suddenly, I saw this dark little blur, a Terrier, bolt between cars and someone quickly cut between the blur and the lane of oncoming traffic to herd it back to the side of the road. So I stepped out of my car to see if I could help. About six of us were circling the dog, trying to trap it between us. As we talked to each other, I found out none of us owned it. Apparently, the dog had jumped out of her car as it turned onto the highway and the owner hadn't noticed.

So this poor little thing was scared absolutely to death. Snarling, shaking, snapping and most of all, trying to get away from us. One of the guys even had a bag of Doritos he was trying to lure the dog over with. But no luck. Eventually she found a spot under an SUV that none of us seemed to be able to reach. There she sat.

I knelt next to the vehicle and slowly inched my hand toward her, pausing when she snarled at it and starting again as she calmed down. Eventually I was touching her paws, then her shoulder, then I grabbed her collar. Wow. You'd have thought I put a cattle prod to her. Yelping, snarling, biting, struggling. It was rough pulling out from under the SUV and my hand was half covered in blood by the time I had her in my arms. As soon as I had her in a hug though, she calmed down like nothing had happened.

She had on tags with a phone number. Her name was Zoe. Someone called the owners, took the dog so I could wash off my hand. Dorito guy had a first aid kit, gave me a band aid. A policeman pulled up about that time. He made sure there was no accident, no one injured, asked if either of the two of us who had been bitten wanted to file a report. No, I didn't want to file a report. The poor little thing was just scared to death. The only thing filing a report would do is drive up the owner's home insurance rates.

So I delivered the pizza's, got back to work. We had a manager trainee in today. "Way to go, new guy," said our store manager, "Now trainee here has an extra hour of paper work to fill out. Next time just run the dog over."

I think he was kidding. Kind of.

Yay work!

Today was my first official day. I spent three hours with what Pizza Hut calls the "Learning Zone" - it's training software. Nothing I didn't already know from, well, working at Pizza Hut for 4 years. But I guess that was 13 years ago. Long enough that there was no such thing as a "Learning Zone".

It was just my first "official" day, though, because I actually got called in to work last Saturday. Another driver called in sick (or something), so I was there just in case it got busy. It didn't. But I got to take a few deliveries and a jump start on my training, so it was good.

Oh, and I got paid. That was good too.