I guess the first person I want to say a bit more about is "Sugar Booger" (the 19 year old secretary at A-1 Plastic Supply with the incredible mistyping skills)... As near as I can recall, she was about 5' 2", extremely well built, with long (bleached) blond hair, dark eyes and amazing legs. In other words, she was totally hot... That's why I really should have been attracted to her - only I wasn't...
I guess I need to explain: The issue was that it was all so contrived. The hair, makeup and clothes - she paid so much attention to every little detail. I swear it must've taken her well over an hour to get ready in the morning... The end result was that you couldn't really see the person through the "packaging". And (for some reason) that had started to matter to me... Then there was her "dumb blond" act. The problem was that it didn't seem to be an act - and that had also started to matter to me.
Aside: Back in high school Sugar Booger would have been exactly my type. But over the years that followed I (slowly) came to realize that there is nothing more attractive than a woman who can run a brush through her hair, throw on some jeans and a shirt, and (in roughly 5 minutes) be ready to face the world. Yes - it is a very special lady who does not need the approval of total strangers to feel good about herself. (They are surprisingly few and far between.) ... But back to Sugar Booger...
She could be rather sweet at times. One day around lunchtime she came back to the warehouse to tell us she was heading down to Forest Lane (where the fast food joints were) and asked if she could bring us anything back. As it turned out Sam, Jim and I each wanted something from a different place, and as we started trying to work out a compromise Sugar Booger said "I really don't mind stopping at all three." And she did...
I mean - it made sense for her to do things like that for the boss because he signed the paychecks. But she had absolutely no reason to go that far out of her way for the guys in the warehouse other than simple thoughtfulness... Well, I guess it could have been evidence of an overwhelming need to please others due to deep-seated insecurity ... but it was still a really nice thing to do :-)
But the real "head scratcher" was her fiance:
Sugar had started working at A-1 roughly the same time as I did and word got around that she was from a really small town and had just recently moved to the big city with her high school sweetheart... So as time went by some of us (primarily Jim, Ivan and I) got to wondering exactly what kind of guy had the "right stuff" to capture her heart...
Then one day she was late to work because she had to take her car to the shop, and she mentioned that her fiance was going to be picking her up that afternoon. So - when quitting time rolled around a few of us just "happened" to be looking out one of the side windows as he pulled into the parking lot...
When he got out of his car (a 68 Olds 442 as I recall) we were all surprised - and puzzled... Judging from the letterman's jacket and the "swagger" he had probably been the "alpha jock" at whatever high school they went to - but he looked like he had played goalie for the dart team (I'm talking seriously bad complexion)... Now - I'm not really qualified to judge whether men are good looking or not (I don't swing that way), but we were all pretty darn sure this guy was butt ugly. It was like "You have got to be kidding me!!!"
You know - If I'd had more than the slightest interested in "Sugar" I probably would have gone "obsessive compulsive" trying to figure out exactly what she saw in him and what the basis of their relationship was. (Lots of possibilities there.) But some puzzles are best left unsolved ... and she was one of them....
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
Sunday, September 2, 2012
Misdirection
One of the things you learn very quickly as a delivery driver is to never trust the address on the invoice.
Sometimes the company name isn't quite right... Sometimes a large company will have multiple facilities and the invoice shows the wrong one... Quite often there are duplicate street names in different suburbs, or a single street might pass through multiple suburbs with duplicate numbering... Some streets need the correct east/west/north/south designation to identify the location... And even within a single zip code there could be a street, circle, place, court, avenue or boulevard with the same name.
The point is that there's a lot that can go wrong with an address - and the simplest of errors can ruin a delivery driver's whole day.
Aside: The name "King James" was a perfect example. There were a total of six variants scattered around the Dallas / Forth Worth area. We had customers in 4 of them and it wasn't unusual for the invoice to show the wrong one...
Yeah - I don't know if A-1 Plastic Supply was typical in this respect or not, but their delivery invoicing system seemed to be astonishly error prone. The salesmen (who originated the information) didn't care about anything other than their commission and it wasn't really anyone's job to check the addresses prior to delivery... (BTW: I'm sure the accountant checked them thoroughly before sending out the bills, but she wasn't involved in preparing the delivery invoices.)
But by far the most significant source of errors was "Sugar Booger" (the secretary). She had a horrible tendency to transpose numbers (or miss them by one) when she typed the invoices...
Now - I definitely didn't have time to check every address, but I knew where the regular customers were and I had quickly figured out where all the industrial and commercial areas were, so I could usually spot the blatant errors. Still, it seemed like at least once a week one would slip past me.
If the problem was a typo like "1712" instead of "1721" it wasn't too big of a deal (same block - other side of the street). That happened often enough that when an address came up "empty" my first course of action was to make a quick pass a couple of blocks up and down the street. (That usually worked.) But when the typo involved the more significant digits it became a huge problem. I'd have to try and find a phone (they didn't put payphones in industrial parks) so I could find out where I was supposed to be and ask about the relative priorities of the remaining deliveries, etc... It was a major pain in the butt :-)
There was one incident that I still remember quite clearly. It involved a new customer located just east of downtown Dallas (in an area that I was totally unfamiliar with). The invoice directed me to the 4100 block, which turned out to be a rundown residential area. After doing the usual "back and forth" thing I finally headed off to find a payphone only to discover that the customer was actually in the 1400 block... By the time I got back on route I had lost almost an hour and had to skip the rest of day's deliveries. (I was under strict orders to be back before a certain time. Overtime was not an option.)
I was still pretty pissed off when I got back to A-1 and went right to "William T" (the boss) to complain. He said that if I had a problem with Sugar Booger I needed to work it out with her, so I headed up to the front desk to try and determine exactly what her malfunction was... I explained the problem as calmly as I could (under the circumstances) and her response was to give me a big smile and say (in her thick southern accent) "Ah know Ah'm stupid... Ah cain't help it!"
Yeah, I have to admit - that caught me completely off guard... I mostly just wanted to ask her to please double check the numbers, but something about that smile made my mind go blank :-) ... So I just turned around and went back to the warehouse...
And I'm betting "William T" knew exactly how that was going to turn out when he sent me up there :-)
Sometimes the company name isn't quite right... Sometimes a large company will have multiple facilities and the invoice shows the wrong one... Quite often there are duplicate street names in different suburbs, or a single street might pass through multiple suburbs with duplicate numbering... Some streets need the correct east/west/north/south designation to identify the location... And even within a single zip code there could be a street, circle, place, court, avenue or boulevard with the same name.
The point is that there's a lot that can go wrong with an address - and the simplest of errors can ruin a delivery driver's whole day.
Aside: The name "King James" was a perfect example. There were a total of six variants scattered around the Dallas / Forth Worth area. We had customers in 4 of them and it wasn't unusual for the invoice to show the wrong one...
Yeah - I don't know if A-1 Plastic Supply was typical in this respect or not, but their delivery invoicing system seemed to be astonishly error prone. The salesmen (who originated the information) didn't care about anything other than their commission and it wasn't really anyone's job to check the addresses prior to delivery... (BTW: I'm sure the accountant checked them thoroughly before sending out the bills, but she wasn't involved in preparing the delivery invoices.)
But by far the most significant source of errors was "Sugar Booger" (the secretary). She had a horrible tendency to transpose numbers (or miss them by one) when she typed the invoices...
Now - I definitely didn't have time to check every address, but I knew where the regular customers were and I had quickly figured out where all the industrial and commercial areas were, so I could usually spot the blatant errors. Still, it seemed like at least once a week one would slip past me.
If the problem was a typo like "1712" instead of "1721" it wasn't too big of a deal (same block - other side of the street). That happened often enough that when an address came up "empty" my first course of action was to make a quick pass a couple of blocks up and down the street. (That usually worked.) But when the typo involved the more significant digits it became a huge problem. I'd have to try and find a phone (they didn't put payphones in industrial parks) so I could find out where I was supposed to be and ask about the relative priorities of the remaining deliveries, etc... It was a major pain in the butt :-)
There was one incident that I still remember quite clearly. It involved a new customer located just east of downtown Dallas (in an area that I was totally unfamiliar with). The invoice directed me to the 4100 block, which turned out to be a rundown residential area. After doing the usual "back and forth" thing I finally headed off to find a payphone only to discover that the customer was actually in the 1400 block... By the time I got back on route I had lost almost an hour and had to skip the rest of day's deliveries. (I was under strict orders to be back before a certain time. Overtime was not an option.)
I was still pretty pissed off when I got back to A-1 and went right to "William T" (the boss) to complain. He said that if I had a problem with Sugar Booger I needed to work it out with her, so I headed up to the front desk to try and determine exactly what her malfunction was... I explained the problem as calmly as I could (under the circumstances) and her response was to give me a big smile and say (in her thick southern accent) "Ah know Ah'm stupid... Ah cain't help it!"
Yeah, I have to admit - that caught me completely off guard... I mostly just wanted to ask her to please double check the numbers, but something about that smile made my mind go blank :-) ... So I just turned around and went back to the warehouse...
And I'm betting "William T" knew exactly how that was going to turn out when he sent me up there :-)
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