Tips for Ordering Pizza

If you have been told before that you are out of our store's delivery area, don't try to be clever and place your order over the Internet. A decent driver will notice the address, and alert the insider in charge. If you're lucky, we'll allow you to change your order to a “Meet At”. If you decide to be even more cute and not answer your phone when we call, we won't even give you that much. We'll cancel your order, and eat your food.

If you decide to order delivery, BE AT HOME until we get there. We may tell you 45 minutes, but if we get another delivery going out that way, it might not take that long. There are few things more annoying or scary than pulling up to a house that looks abandoned. Especially at night. You pull that crap on me at night, you get two knocks on the door and a courtesy call. Don't pick up the phone? Fine, I'll go back to the store and you can wait another 30 minutes until another driver gets free to bring the food.

If you want to pay with a check, be sure you ask if the store takes checks before the driver gets out to you. My store does not. Another franchise of Multinational Pizza Corp will take them, but only if there is identifying information printed on the check (address, driver's license number, etc.). It will save a lot of time and trouble if you just take the 30 seconds it takes to ask.

If you are paying with a credit or debit card, that's fine. Just have it ready when you are ordering, because we need the card number and expiration date. It's very annoying to have to listen to you dig around for your credit card, and we usually have other stuff that needs to be done.

If you order late at night – after 8:00 or so on weekdays, 9:30 or 10:00 on weekends – be prepared to wait. We run one driver that late at night, and it doesn't take much to send delivery times through the roof. Pay attention to the delivery estimate, and think seriously about making it a pickup order.

If you are ordering over the phone, and you either get put on hold, or the phone rings more than twice, think very very hard about making your order pick up instead of delivery. Sometimes, delivery time for our store is over an hour. The time it would take for the same order carry out? Less than 30 minutes, usually less than 20. The choke point is in getting it out the door, getting it made and cooked is rarely a problem.

No, we don't carry change for a 100. We carry $15. Sometimes $20, depending on the store. No more.

Also, remember to tip! Tips are how we pay bills, gas, and maintenance. We don't make minimum wage, and if the store charges a delivery fee, we usually don't get all (or even most) of it.

Problems

What would life be without them? I bit the bullet and bought a factory computer, only to discover that the video card was not fit for purpose as a gaming card. I redeemed some geek cred by immediately buying a new mid-level card and a new power supply and installing them myself. When I say not fit for purpose, I mean it was overheating in 20 minutes every time I tried to play something more graphically demanding than Solitaire.

There are problems with Multinational Pizza Corporation as well. We had three drivers leave in a week, two fired and one had given his two weeks notice two weeks ago. This puts the store in a bad position – we are down to five drivers, and two of us are working as little as possible because we have other jobs that we need to focus on. It's looking like it will be another 60 hour week for me this week. On top of that problem, I am seriously burned out on working there. It has gotten to the point where I hate going in, and hate being there. It's started affecting my attitude as well, which I do not care for at all. I've seen other drivers going through this, and I am going to do my best to not be as much of a pain as some of the others have been.

To top it all off, my sinuses are waging war against the rest of my body, resulting in my having had a headache for the last week. It's getting better slowly – at first, it was near the level of a migraine in terms of disabling pain, but now it's down to a dull throb. Still a pain though, and I can't wait for it to get gone.

Maybe next post will be better. I can always hope, at any rate...