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Mom's
This a bumper-sticker sized magnet. Whatever turns you
on... Now here's
a perk Check out another article from the SF Chronicle to find out. Not Enraptured I am a theatre critic OK...so it's a new "career", but if you're interested in reading my reviews, go here Updated 2/11/01 WHAT I'M READING Christmas gift from my friend, Diane, who felt it was time I learn more about Australia That's it for today!
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15 February 2001 It was Valentine day and it sounded like a good idea. My friends Shelly & Ellen called and alerted me to the fact that a local florist was hiring folks to deliver flowers on Valentine’s day. A good way to make a few extra bucks, they said. It actually sounded like fun, and something I’d never done before, so what the heck. I called "Marty," the woman who was signing people up and told her I was available. "Bev Sykes!" she exclaimed. "You’re my hero!" She said she reads my letters to the editor and the occasional column I write for the newspaper and she was in agreement with everything I wrote. Well. We were off to a very good start. I went to orientation on Monday night. Everything was so organized that you just knew it would all run like clockwork. Everybody gets a clipboard, a town map, and tags to leave when nobody is home. Flowers would be grouped according to area of the town, there would be two coordinators organizing everything. We learned how to mark our log sheets, how to take care of problems, where we’d find boxes and padding so we could keep arrangements upright, etc., etc. I signed up for the 9:30-2:30 shift. They started delivering at 7:30, but I wanted to have my chat with Peggy, and get Walt off to work as well. Besides, I’m lazy. They were to pay $3 per delivery or attempted delivery. We use our own cars. I wondered about a small Honda, but she assured me it would be fine. I found out later that Marta (Ned’s wife) was delivering flowers today, for the other florist in town. Only they pay minimum wage and provided the truck. I would be supplying my own gas, obviously. She suggested that we bring our own lunch because we’d probably be too busy to take a "lunch hour." And that we got to keep all our tips. I told Peggy I’d probably get all my walking done during the day. She asked how, since I'd be driving everywhere. I told her I suspect that I would be walking around apartment complexes and things like that. So at the appointed hour this morning, I presented myself to the florist. Nobody seemed to know why I was there and they couldn’t find the guy I was to report to. I talked to the woman who seemed to be in charge and she said that they didn't have the routes organized yet and could I come back in 40 minutes. So I came home and unloaded the trunk (which I’d forgotten to do before I left the first time). I then came back downtown, armed with a gift certificate I’d been given at Christmas for a bookstore, which is next door to the florist. I had a couple of books I wanted to get (She’s Come Undone, and He, She, and It, both of which Steve recommended to me) and figured I’d pick them up while I was waiting. I did. [Aside: When you get a gift certificate, don’t most places give you the "change" in cash? My purchases came $4 short of the amount of the certificate and now in order to get that money, I have to go buy another book--which bothers me because I have philosophical differences with this particular store and don’t like patronizing them in the first place!] But I digress. So I go back to the florist and finally Tony is there. He seems flustered and not sure what to do with me, but he does find five orders I can deliver. They are all marked "Central," for the area which I know pretty well, and I load them into the car. That alone is tricky because of space problems. And they didn’t have the promised boxes or padding material. Loading everything involved five trips to the car for the five arrangements, so already I had done my share of walking, since I was parked a bit of a distance from the florist. The first delivery was not successful. Nobody home. I wrote up a tag to leave and took the flowers back to the car. I was regretting not having brought water with me, since I was thirsty, but I had to drive right by my house on the way to the next delivery, so I stopped, dropped off the books, picked up bottled water, and got on my way again. The next delivery was to an apartment complex. And I couldn’t figure out how to get in or where to see apartment numbers. In frustration I finally called the client, but my cel phone wouldn’t work right and apparently my voice kept cutting in and out and it was impossible to have a conversation. She did get that I had a delivery, and fortunately she came downstairs to pick it up from me. She was half a block from where I was standing, so I hurried down the block to give the flowers to her. I misread the next address and ended up parking half a block from where I wanted to be. Then the recipients weren’t home, so I had to come back to the car, put the flowers back in, write up a tag, and walk back down and put it on the door. After that I got smart and wrote up the tag BEFORE I attempted delivery and put it in my pocket (but as it turned out, all the rest of the deliveries were successful after all, so I wrote all those tags needlessly). The next street was one I couldn’t find. They hadn’t given me a map. It was a name I recognized ("Duke") and I was sure it was with all the other collegiate names--Rutgers, Amherst, Stanford, Brown, Harvard, Villanova, Drake, etc. But I couldn’t find it. I drove around looking, but finally just took the flowers back so I could get a map. Turns out Duke isn’t Central Davis after all, but East Davis. It had been mis-marked. Tony kind of scratched his head when I came back. I could see there weren’t many flowers waiting to be delivered. But he did find 3 arrangements for me. I had been told we would be assigned one area of town. These 3 deliveries took me to 3 corners of town (fortunately it’s not that large a town). One of them was a small vase with teddy bear and balloons attached to it. I put it on the floor of the front seat, but the balloons (3 of them) completely obscured my view. I couldn’t see in back of me or to the side, and whenever I went to make a turn, I’d have to grab the strings of the balloon and pull them down so I could see over them. It was really something out of a slapstick movie at some point. The second round of deliveries was much more successful and I even managed a quick trip through the Jack in the Box drive-thru for lunch. All of the apartment deliveries were on the second floor (of course) and at the opposite end of the building from where I parked (of course) and at the university apartment complex, there was no parking to be had for love or money. I parked quite illegally. But I finally got all this batch delivered (pleased because I had to leave no tags at all), and went back to get more. Only Tony said there were no more. The florists were working on arrangements, but he was going to have me go away and come back when they were ready. Or he gave me the option of quitting. I’d worked 3 hours, made 8 deliveries and drove 20 miles (Shelly and Ellen in that same time had made 26 deliveries, but they had a larger car, were working together, and didn’t have to worry about finding parking!). I decided I’d had enough of an "experience." I came home. Suddenly medical transcription was looking a heck of a lot better to me. (Oh yeah--Shelly and Ellen worked 3 days and I worked the one and none of us got one single tip.) |
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Some pictures from this journal |
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Created 2/13/01 by Bev Sykes |
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