From the Pizza Road

So, a while back I alluded to my last decade’s employment in what is essentially the same “white collar”Actually, I normally wear a t-shirt and jeans (when I even bother to wear pants!), I just mean “as opposed to really working for a living”. job. However, this doesn’t mean I can’t understand people with different types of jobs–as I commented elsewhere, I don’t “come from money” in any meaningful sense, and so I have worked some jobs that are pretty distant from what I do now.

For instance, I have never done pizza delivery, but I did spend a couple of months working as a chicken delivery driver. I drove a little yellow car with a rooster on the roof, and did the deliveries in a hideous blue polyester uniform.

So, I have some idea about the world of delivery drivers. However, apparently either the world of pizza delivery drivers is quite different from the world of the chicken-mobile, or else Minneapolis has a side I haven’t personally seen, or some combination thereof, because some of the stories in this article about the experiences of six Minneapolis delivery drivers is nothing like anything I ever saw.

For instance:

I’ve been tipped in pot. One time I delivered to this girl on Hennepin Avenue, and she said, “Wanna come upstairs and smoke some pot and do some whip-its?” So I said okay, and hung out with her for about half an hour. But I get dyslexic when I smoke pot, so it’s not very good for me. My math skills get poor.

Yeah, that never happened to me. And that’s not even talking about the naked people.

There is always someone waiting in the wings. The perverted puppeteer. It is an icky, icky world.

The CityPages also runs a blog that is written from the perspective of a pizza guy. On the whole it makes me pretty happy I have the kind of job I do. I’m usually a pretty good tipper (enough that I sometimes get in trouble for overtipping when I’m managing a shared bill) but the Rich White Guys vs Flipper Boy story is enough to make me add on another buck or two next time someone brings me a pie.