Random Musings of a Pizza Delivery Guy

A lot of people use Pizza Delivery Guy as shorthand for an undesirable job. Not quite as bad as the derogatory "burger flipper" of course, but close. However, I have found it to be kind of enjoyable at times. Sure, there are the cruddier parts of the job: doing dishes, mopping the floor, sometimes scrubbing months-old residue off of the floor tiles.... But it can pay pretty well for a part-time gig and if the other employees are cool, then it can be fun to work there. You also learn a bunch of stuff. I will list a few of the things I have learned in my two and a half months of delivering pizza:

-An astounding number of people are surprised by my arrival. Mind you, they called us or went online and ordered pizza, but that doesn't mean that they will be dressed when I knock on the door. Or that they will have their method of payment prepared.
-Paying for pizza with a check is ridiculous. Not only do we have to charge people an extra fifty cents when they pay by check (to pay for the TeleCheck processing fee), it ends up being five times as complicated as using cash or just paying with your stinking debit card, dang it.
-There are many people who drive as though they have nowhere to be. Also, those people seem to derive a perverse pleasure from delaying those of us who DO have somewhere to be.
-Almost all of the pizza drivers at my store do the job for extra money, not because they are losers who cannot hold a "real" job. They are like me; working a second job to make ends meet. This makes it all the more important for people to be generous with tips, since that is the only way pizza delivery is profitable. Heaven knows the pizza chains won't pay anything better than minimum wage. If people stopped tipping, there would be no pizza delivery. No one could afford to do it.
-Sometimes, the stupid punk "racer boy" drivers do get their comeuppance. This past week, there was a putz in a semi-pimped mid-90's Dodge Neon who got flipped off by a guy driving a big cruddy van. So the racer boy decided to chase the van, harass and tailgate the driver. And when the van driver slammed on his brakes, racer boy plowed into his rear bumper. The van driver got out, looked at his barely scratched bumper, looked at the now-totaled Neon, shrugged and drove away. Racer boy had to call the police and wait for a sheriff's deputy to show up, fill out a report, and then get his destroyed car towed. Good thing he spent thousands of dollars on aftermarket accessories so that it could look that much more ridiculous when he totaled it by tailgating and being a douche.