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 :-)