Another day in the life of a pizza deliverer

LAST WEEK WAS a pretty good week.

With last Tuesday’s congressional steamroll by the Democrats, the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld on Wednesday and a three-day weekend to top it all off, you’d think it probable that a vigorous, young liberal such as myself — whose virgin lips the cup of political glory had never yet touched — would still be celebrating, likely with a less metaphorical drink.

I spent a better part of last few days wondering: What was my problem? Why did I still feel so miserable?

Was it the fact that my man Phil took a gubernatorial thrashing from a man who still heads his resume with 1970’s “Hercules in New York”?

Was it the fact that despite having voted, my vote didn’t count in any of the congressional races that really ended up “mattering?” Would I feel better about my vote if I lived in Kalispell, Montana?

Was the problem even political at all? Perhaps it’s this cold seems to keep going ‘round and ‘round and finally, a few days ago, managed to catch up with me too.

Finally, last Friday, at precisely 4:17 p.m., all those vague, abstract senses of misery began to coalesce, take shape and form and even smell.

Indeed, I recognized it by the scent: burning pork flesh atop a greasy lavabed of cheese.

I had to be to work at 5:00 p.m., and this — pizza delivery — was yet again unmasked as the root of my unhappiness.

The last time I talked about it, I discussed the apparent difficulty of ordering pizza.

Today, I would like to discuss the apparent difficulty of upholding a kind of “deliveree” etiquette.

The first thing you should not do when asking that your pizza be delivered to you is lie about your major cross-streets.

There isn’t a single driver I can think of who is so dense that he will not realize it when he drives half a block south of Bullard to find an address that you’ve identified as being nearest to “Cedar and Herndon.”

Do not think you’re fooling us. We’ll ultimately just end up kicking over a few footlights or backing into your mailbox.

The second thing I’d like to address, and perhaps the most important: do not expect us to bring anything you have not explicitly asked for.

At some pizza chains, I know, they do bring along sides of ranch and parmesan cheese and crushed peppers. At ours, we do not.

Before you get too upset about this, bear in mind that for the price of a large combination at that other store, you could probably make a down payment on a small house.

These things — ranch, parmesan, peppers — are the most reasonable things to ask for, and since there is some inconsistency between chains, I do not get particularly irritated when a first-time customer asks me if I have any.

There are a few things that do get me a little upset though, especially since these things tend to operate on the assumption that I have a pizza oven in my back seat.

I don’t, by the way.

On one delivery I went on a few months ago, for instance, a customer asked me if I had any extra breadsticks with me.

Would he, or anyone, really want breadsticks that I just happened to be carrying along with me in my car?

I know that if my pizza guy ever tried to sell me breadsticks at my door, I would call the nearest health inspector and ask him to please slash his tires.

Not that I’d ever order pizza in the first place.

On a related note, if you have not ordered pizza at all and you happen to see me walking to somebody else’s door, do not shout at me asking to “hook you up” with a free pizza.

This is the sort of thing I hear at least twice a day and is really only funny to thirteen-year-old boys, a subsection of the population that typically devotes a lot of time to cracking jokes rooted in the erroneous assumption that the phrase “Got Milk?” is somehow funny and masturbating to pictures they’ve found on MySpace.

No, I do not have a pizza to hook you up with, and if you’re old enough to drive legally, I’ll probably just end up shaking my head, ashamed for you and your posterity.

This is the point where, realizing just how misanthropic I’ve become, I need to stop and remind myself that there are, indeed, reasons to live.

Last week, for instance, was a good week.

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