It seems right around COVID times that it became normalized to reward delivery people. I was delivering pizza back then, and with the lock down, people were EXTREMELY appreciative of any and all deliveries.
It became common for me to see people with full mini-fridges or coolers of sodas on ice at the porch, with a big sign saying, "Delivery guys! Help yourself! We appreciate you!"
I never did though. Never even considered a soda or a snack, even though this one house had fat ass turkey and Swiss on expensive wheat bread sammiches.
I love sammiches, like a fat kid loves cake. They even had leaf lettuce, tomatoes and red onions on them. WITH LITTLE BAGS OF FUNYUNS OR DORITOS!!!
My heart wept, but I never took one of those delicious plastic wrapped sammiches out of that glass fronted cooler. I just didn't feel it was right.
Once, after things had calmed down, one of my regulars asked through the Ring camera speaker, "Hey pizza guy! Why don't you ever take a sandwich or a soda? They're for you too!"
I turned and spoke to the little black box. "Ma'am, we get tips, and our cars are air conditioned. Those guys get run like slaves and don't even have time to go to the bathroom. No, they deserve it more."
She called the store and demanded that they re-run her credit card so she could tip $50 on a $50 order instead of $10. Money was good back then.
Only time I've seen a goody basket was before COVID, it was during the winter before the holidays. They left me an insulated mug of hot cocoa, plus some snacks, the cocoa was just right, by the time I got there.
It was a good thing it wasn't non league hot chocolate or I'd still be waiting for it to cool down, iykyk. :)
Ah, fuck that person! I say "sammiches" and I'm 50 years old. I mean, I also say "sandwiches", but silly, excited whimsy makes the world go round!
(which is why I also excitedly cry "baps!" when I see bats, and refer to wasps as "waps" 😛)
This quote from C.S. Lewis sums it all up for me:
"When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
This is the same reason that your "Baps" to me are "Sky Flippy Floppies", a cat's paws are "murder mittens" (feat. TOE BEANS), a sheep is a "Land Cloud", Piranhas are "river scissors" and a Penguin is a "tuxedo chicken." If there's no whimsy in the world, what are we doing?
Also, a good sammich (or sandwich, for the dull people reading) is a thing of beauty and joy. Which is precisely why I hugely appreciate you resisting and leaving them for the delivery people that are so mistreated and overworked. If you'd resisted cake I'd have been like "eh, everybody can turn down cake. That's just being responsible with calories and blood sugar". But a cold meat sandwich with salad? Oh man, that's proper food that is!
You know (I agree with you) I don't know why but sammiches does create an immediate, viscerally negative reaction for some reason, and I'm full bore whimsy.
I'm thinking about it and it's just food related. doggo = fine. Chonk = fine. Hubby, wifey = fine.
I order a lot of stuff online and I truly appreciate the effort that goes into delivering hundreds or thousands of packages in a work day. I do alright, so I set up a modest station on my porch that I try to keep stocked with snacks and drinks with a message saying I appreciate the hard work and to take some snacks for the road. I've been looking for a good beverage cooler to make sure the drinks are actually cold.
I do last mile delivery. Since I'm not paid by the hour, I can take my time and work at a comfortable pace. Watching the fedex guys and the amazon guys run around like chickens is crazy.
I thought it was opposite? Get paid by the hour and you want to work slow so you get more work hours, get paid by the day or per-stop and you want to finish as fast as possible to have more free time for the same pay?
According to r/fedexers they seem to say you get overworked and screwed if you do daily but you can take your time with hourly.
Honestly I feel like hourly or daily it's going to be a question of whether you consider safety or free time more important
At UPS we get paid hourly and some people take their time because "why rush and get paid less for the same work" but some people are running and gunning because they want to get home as soon as possible
At FedEx where they get paid daily (at least on certain routes), I'm sure there's a mix of people who want to make the most amount of money per hour (and get home early) and people who work slower and get paid less per hour because they don't want to hurt their bodies as much on the job
but try-hard-wholsome, either planned or played-up for viral potential just always gives me a bad feeling. It is like the opposire feeling to hearing good music or seeing good art. It's actual anti-art, not as in the art genre, but art's antithesis.
I know people need humour and good stuff in their lives, especially now, but there are a lot more ways to get this than by doom-scroll material
I'm not even trying to argue with you per se, but... what's the alternative? Are you suggesting we just shouldn't enjoy simple, nice things on the internet/social media? I really do not think this is the type of content that is "poisoning" society.
When you accept that everything is fake, even so-called "real" interactions, you can start to relax and value things for what they are instead of getting bogged down in whys and hows.
As someone who genuinely IS this kind of silly, people expecting everything to be beige and homogeneous has killed a bit of my spark. Joe Public genuinely treats you like something's wrong with you for trying to make them laugh.
I bet that the Homeowner was very Amused by how the Delivery Driver was making the extra effort to make the homeowner laugh by the tomfoolery. That is exactly what I would've done. In a heartbeat
🤣🤣I absolutely love this, thanks for posting. Definitely made that guys delivery day. It's so nice to see that not all of us have lost our ability to be people to one another 👏❤️ choose love folks!
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u/Afrojones66 2d ago
That’s clearly a gremlin with a job.