Delivery story 433 K.Y. writes: I have been a delivery driver for over 3.5 years. I won't lie. I do enjoy my job. But I have had two customers that really stand out as the worst experiences I have had at my store. The first was to a Super 8 hotel. Middle room. Second floor. This customer had one of our other drivers first. The ranch for his wings and olives on his pizza was the only mess up we had. I got back from an earlier run as they took his complaint. I remade his pizza to perfection and grabbed ranch off the salad bar and the pre-packaged ranch (pre-packaged doesn't taste all that great but some people like it) and take off on the 7.5-minute drive through my little town to the Super 8. He was a shade of purple and red that I had never seen before or since, clearly irate. I give him his new pizza and the ranch and he gave me a five. I thought it was cool and all was right in the world. Then he said something I couldn't make out and his wife said we forgot the Pepsi. He then decides to call me various forms of fag and so on, yelling the whole time. I admit I was a nerd--at the time I was 5'10" and 120 lbs. I had only been a driver for just under a year. I just walked away. So he decided to scream down the hall at me. I'm not sure what he said but I didn't care. I wanted out of there. The second customer was earlier this year. Snow was on the ground and I drive a G6 with mostly bald tires. This customer is angry that I was late. He got the call center. The call center screws everything up in a bad, bad way. Like sending me to the town 12 miles to the south when I need to go to the little town 9 miles to the east of my store and so on. In this case our store had stopped accepting checks almost 3 years before this. Call center said we do accept checks. I told the guy we do not accept checks. He proceeds to throw stuff, yelling, and pretty much looked like a 6'5" three-year-old. I interrupt him a little rudely with, "Hey, stop yelling so I can help you," just to get his attention and ask if he has a credit or debit card and I will call my store and pay for it that way. He calms a little and I call and it rings and rings and rings. My phone does this when it doesn't want to connect. It should have went to the Pizza Hut radio. So I hang up and call a co-worker's cell and run the card. Dude is losing it the longer it takes. I get done, he goes off on how we have always accepted checks, and I argue that we only accept them when our credit machine is down. He says we should have been on-time. I was sliding up and down streets on the snow. And he didn't have a number on his house so I had to guess. He said he was home the whole time and I should have called. I showed him my phone with three calls to his number. By the end he said he will never order from Pizza Hut again. I couldn't help but tell him that customers like him make my job a living hell. I realize now I could have handled the situation better, and have defused a few situations worse than that since. But mostly it's customers that will argue with me that the delivery charge is my gratuity that make me wish there were more job options where I live. Costs way too much to move and I barely get by as is. return to top