Hair Pie, Bake Two

Coupla' months back, my associate A. Smetanka asked me a few questions about my career as a Zimorino's pizza delivery monkey for a feature article he was working on for the Missoula Independent. Ever eager to wax overly philosophical this type of thing, I made it into a characteristically long-winded exposition, trying to imbue some sort of existentialist heroism into the pie-driver profession.

As it turned out, Andy was only able to use a wee smattering of my comments in the article (which is here), and I didn't want all this spiel to go to waste, so I am recycling it here. Today. For you. The reader.

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What did you like best about delivering pizzas?
Driving pies was a great job for me because I enjoy being alone and I liked driving around and seeing parts of town that I'd otherwise have no reason to visit. You get to see the inside of lots of really nice houses, as well as some that are much less pleasant. It's pretty interesting to get a little 45-second glimpse into peoples' lives that are much different than yours. I also got into the habit of listening to wacky talk radio shows like Art Bell during deliveries. Driving around on a warm spring night and getting paid for it is a wonderful thing, and a very fond memory for me. Another enjoyable challenge of the job is when you get three or four orders on a single run, which requires you to work out a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem to find the optimal route to all four stops and then back to the store. You quickly learn how Missoula's streets are laid out, how the addressing grid works, and all of the stealthy shortcuts you can take to avoid stoplights and traffic, such as the back route that runs from Scott St. to Reserve just south of I-90. And of course, finishing a night of work with 30-40 bucks cash in your pocket makes for a great night of drinking.

What was your least favorite thing about delivering pizzas?
The main drawback of the job is the wear on your car. It's not uncommon to put 150 miles a night on it, not to mention firing the ignition upwards of 30 times. In fact the starter was the first thing to fail on my '83 Subaru, then the transmission. I once calculated that the repair costs during one month were greater than my income. Then there's the usual litany of complaints that any driver will agree on: getting bitten by dogs, speeding tickets, getting stuck or lost, and above all, getting stiffed. One guy hit and killed a dog on his first day at Zimorino's.

Were you expected to perform kitchen/cleanup duties as well as deliver pizzas? Was there friction or resentment between kitchen employees, drivers and dispatchers?
Drivers at Zimorino's are expected to help out the dishwashers when deliveries are slow. They also are expected to make dinner salads, grate parmesan, fold pizza boxes, cut vegetables, and perform many menial cleaning tasks. This arrangement usually worked out pretty well, and the dishwashers definitely appreciate the extra hands. There is indeed a lot of resentment when drivers don't pitch in. Many drivers will sit in their car between runs, or dawdle on their way back to the store to avoid having to help in the kitchen, which always pisses off the kitchen.

What's the weirdest/funniest thing that ever happened to you on a delivery?
There is a customer in Missoula who is well known to delivery persons. He rarely tips, and if he does, it's the nickel change on a $12.95 order, which he snidely says to "put in your gas tank." This fellow is incredibly rude and sociopathic and apparently lives in his own filth in a dilapidated house that's no more than 500 square feet. One night he ordered a pizza and a salad, and I forgot to bring the salad. When he found out about this, he launched into a bizarre paroxysm of clenched-teeth swearing and pacing back and forth in front of the door as if the salad was the only thing that was going to keep him alive. I didn't know what I should do, so I just stood there watching him for about a minute, until he eventually stomped back in the house. Apparently he got over it, because he continued to order from us after that.

I also had a rather corpulent woman in a motel room answer the door in a bra and she seemed completely comfortable and unfazed.

Did you ever drink or use drugs on the job?
I never did, but it is very common for a driver to accept bong hits or beers as tips.

What were some of your pet peeves with regard to customers, ordering and payment?
There is a dire need for public awareness on the protocol for ordering food to be delivered to your home. Easily 80% of the disconnects that occur during deliveries could be avoided had the customer been more aware of the protocol. It is truly boggling how many people genuinely don't know that you're supposed to tip a pizza guy. Having something delivered to your door is a huge luxury; people should have the integrity and good sense to pony up for it. Stiffing a pizza driver is a grievous moral offense, tantamount to a kick in the nuts, not to mention very unwise, particularly if you're a repeat customer. The E-Z calculation is: a minimum tip of two dollars for one pizza, a dollar for each additional pizza. Also: Customers should turn their porch light on after dusk to facilitate finding your address. If your house is difficult to find, or your street has a modifier like "East" or "Circle", or special instructions such as a gate code are required, or there is an apartment number, or you have a feral dog, this absolutely needs to be communicated to the driver beforehand. In addition, know that pizza drivers are not your personal go-fers; they are not empowered to stop and pick you up a six-pack or a pack of smokes on the way. If you ask a driver to meet you somewhere, don't expect him to wait fifteen minutes for you to show up.

I worked as a dispatcher briefly, and am eager to report that it is one of the most irritating jobs I have ever had. People think nothing of calling up the pizza place, and then deciding what ingredients they want, as if you have time to listen to several minutes of "uhhhhh". Or they need you to read the entire menu for them, or they're talking to three other people in the room while on the phone. Or they think it's cute to get the four-year-old kid to call up and order. Or they order proprietary items like Tricky Stix that you'd get at Pizza Hut and then get upset that you don't have them. (We had a funny joke name for these: "Jesus Christ Superstix")

In Missoula, which areas and neighborhoods generally yielded the best tips? How about the worst tips?
As a geography major at UM, I was particularly fascinated with the spatial component of pizza delivery, and for a while I was seriously considering commissioning a study of pizza delivery tips by neighborhood for a cartography project. Indeed, there is a doctoral dissertation's worth of demographic and socioeconomic analysis that could be done on the subject, and the results would probably surprise most.

Probably the most interesting thing about the whole phenomenon of tipping pizza drivers is that there is no positive correlation between the recipients' income and they amount they tip. It would likewise be inaccurate to say that the best tips are in the rich neighborhoods. In Missoula, the best tips are found in the University area, with its urbane, socially conscious, community-minded demographic. The North Side, which has a diverse commingling of old and young hippies and working-class and blue-collar people, is a pretty reliable area for tips. Also the Rattlesnake, a pretty diverse area itself, especially in the lower part. Incidentally, deliveries to hotel rooms are also typically pretty fruitful, as are office parties.

The worst tippers are unfortunately found in the most far-flung neighborhoods like Linda Vista and El Mar Estates out on Mullan Rd. Generally speaking, most of the neighborhoods you'd associate with the term "suburban sprawl," the McMansion fortresses and the cul-de-sacs, and the cut-and-run developments with names like "Fox Ridge Estates" are always the worst tip yields. I don't know if it's because these people are so beset with oppressive mortgages that they're less willing to part with their cash, or they're completely unfamiliar with the nature of a service job, or if stingy people simply tend to be attracted to those neighborhoods, or some other reason. But I know at Zimorino's, you avoided El Mar and Linda Vista runs if at all possible, because nothing's worse than getting stiffed or a dollar tip on a run that takes half an hour to drive to. These areas are doubly unfavorable because it's often so hard to find the houses when there's four versions of the same street (Ponderosa Drive, Ponderosa Parkway, Ponderosa Circle, etc) and the streets are needlessly curvilinear and disconnected, and all the houses look alike.

How would you rate your company loyalty? What was your perception of other pizza places and their delivery service?
I got the feeling that Zimorino's is a much better place to work as a delivery driver than Pizza Hut or something. For one thing, you aren't required to put the lamp thing on your car or wear those unflattering, humiliating uniforms like Domino's drivers. Also, the pizza at Zimorino's is significantly more expensive than the franchise pizza places, which rules out a certain clientele. We seldom got orders from really sketchy people, which accounts for the fact that my career as a driver was pretty uneventful.

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NPR != Pinkos

Next time some Frito-Pie eatin' joker sees fit to resuscitate the hackneyed old complaint that NPR is a bunch of godless, leftist commie faggots, point him to this study: http://www.fair.org/extra/0405/npr-study.html.

Among its findings: among sources and commentaries used for NPR stories, experts with a professed partisan skew to the right of center outnumbered their left-leaning counterparts more than 3 to 2. Citations representatives of right-leaning think tanks outnumbered left-leaning ones more than 4 to 1. Worse, sources representing other than the two major political parties are virtually nil.

Who cares? I don't, not one bit. Except for the small comfort of knowing that my choice to never engage in an asinine argument as to whether media is biased one way or another is somehow more justified by these findings. Scarcely a week goes by where there's not at least one letter to the editor of the two Denver dailies complaining about how obvious that paper's bias is. The worst thing about this line of reasoning is that, nine times out of ten, the complainant is usually upset because the news source is reporting an entirely factual story whose outcome happens to run counter to their zealous belief structure. Or some interviewer challenged a politician sympathetic to their particular views and made them look bad, thus the interviewer must hate that politician and their entire party's platform. Several times this year, there've been letters to the Rocky Mountain News asserting that the paper has a liberal bias because they published unflattering photos of George Bush, which is kind of like complaining that a particular photo makes Paul Prudhomme look fat, you know, not really something that requires any sort of diabolical effort.

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