If You Stiff The Pizza Man, He Will Hate You - FUNNY!

[matcom]

<snip>

By the time you finally extract the portrait of Andrew Jackson from your wallet, you glance outside and spot the driver's vehicle. It's the usual rust-bucket jalopy--a single blinking flasher, sputtering engine, side-view mirror dangling like an eye plucked from the socket. You experience a moment of compassion. You think: What a loser. There but for the grace of God go I. So you tip the guy a dollar. And by the time you've planted yourself in front of the TV, you have completely forgotten the delivery guy.

But the pizza guy hasn't forgotten you. In fact, as he wends his way back to the shop for the next run, he is mentally aggregating multiple aspects of your persona--profiling you.

He knows more about you than you will ever know about him. There are the tangibles: your name, your address, your phone number. And there are the countless intangibles. If he has worked in the racket for a few years--and a decade's labor on the pizza road is not so unusual--he has glimpsed the insides of thousands of homes and apartments. He has borne witness to unimaginable squalor. He has breathed in the stink from your unemptied garbage and your beige urine-soaked carpets. He has gawked at the regal excess of your Lake of the Isles mansion. He has made countless numbing visits to your bleak, ill-lit shithole apartment. He has even caught the scent of the hydroponic marijuana you furtively cultivate under grow lights in the basement.

You should know this: If you stiff the pizza man, he will hate you. There are Nazis. There are baby rapists. And there is that vast class of indifferent, callous swine who stiff the pizza man. Same shit, different name. On the other hand, if you do him up right--prompt exchange, $5 tip--the pizza man will sing your praises to his fellow drivers. If you tip him extravagantly--say, $20 or more on a large order--he will personally arrange an audience with the pope to make the case for your beatification. To the pizza man, the tip is the thing.

In the popular imagination, the pizza man is many other things. He is the punch line to loser jokes. The pimply-faced teen working his first job. The reckless driver who mows down the glaucoma-stricken nun in the crosswalk. The stoner who has lost all ambition. The hapless crime victim whose sorry demise gets 30 seconds on the 10:00 p.m. news. Sometimes, though less commonly, the pizza man is celebrated. In Neal Stephenson's cult cyber-punk novel Snow Crash, he is the hero. The Deliverator, as he is called, works in a failing future America in which pizza delivery constitutes a last remaining arena of national competence. And, finally, there is the pizza man as sexual buccaneer--the stud who stops by for impromptu encounters in countless porn movies and Penthouse Forum letters.

As with so many stereotypes, there are nuggets of truth embedded in all of the above. Last month, City Pages sat down with six of Minneapolis's most prolific pizza drivers to talk about their livelihood: the day-to-day realities of the work, the legendary customers, the rank indignities and, of course, drugs and sex. Over stiff drinks--and on condition of anonymity, to keep these modern-day deliverators from running afoul of their bosses or the law--the pizza men shared their stories. One thing became apparent: The average pizza driver is the consummate profiler. All things considered, he is probably better at his job than the average cop, lawyer, psychiatrist, or other professional profiler. When the pizza man fucks with you, he's playing for keeps.

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1264/article12991.asp

[goddess40]

1. We call these "Reagan vehicles"

"rust-bucket jalopy--a single blinking flasher, sputtering engine, side-view mirror dangling like an eye plucked from the socket. You experience a moment of compassion"
My mother dubbed them that because Reagan made the economy so bad that people couldn't afford to keep there cars in decent shape let alone buy a new one - I have noticed over the past 4 years that they have been increasing again. Maybe we should just start calling them republican instead of Reagan Vehicles.