Just a Silly Story

So, I could write about the hell my customers gave the poor driver who did my route last week. She got all the complaints I did when I started my route, and a couple even flat out yelled at her (I went back to them and told them no more yelling), but you all know about the cranky nature of my customers already.

I could write about the new $500 million investment the company has launched to help “save cost” by finding new ways to fire drivers. But I’m already in a bad mood, so harping on that might work me up to point where I’m a hazard on the road.

So, I’m gonna tell you about a funny story that happened months ago on another route. Before my name came up on the bid list for my current route, I had a temporary bid for someone else’s route. Basically, when another driver owns a route, but is absent (due to injury, alternate work assignment, or some other long term absence) they get to keep their route for when they return, but management will often allow (at the insistence of the union) a temporary bid so a floater driver has a more stable home for awhile.

I loved that other route. The driver came back to it only a few weeks before I was offered my current route. If he hadn’t come back, I would have passed up the other route to keep the temporary bid.

The route was half retail shops along the street (which provided many opportunities to double park and piss people off), and half residential (which provided many opportunities to meet interesting people who often did their best to piss me off). That route was certainly more colorful, and I miss the variety of it. But none of this is the funny part.

I once had a delivery for an empty shop—a shop that had been empty for months with nothing but naked mannequins in the windows. When I saw the boxes for the shop, I did stop to make sure it was still closed. I looked through the glass and saw nothing new—no desk with register, no new merchandise. So sent the boxes back as “address vacant.”

Later in the week, the woman in our office who fields the customer service calls asked me, “Do you remember a delivery for forty-two eighteen ____ Blvd that you sent back as vacant?”

“Yeah,” I replied.

“Why did you think it was vacant?”

“Because there’s nothing in there.”

“Nothing?” she asked. “There weren’t naked mannequins or anything?”

“There were naked mannequins.”

“Do you know why they were naked?” She started to giggle.

“Why?”

“Because you had their clothes in the boxes you sent back.”

Oops.