Fade to Gray: Hands off my nachos
At work I am surrounded my young people who are smarter than me and more acceptable to new technology and change.
One fine example of this is when it comes time to eat dinner. I either run home on break, bring something from home like a sandwich or run out and buy something. I tend not to do that last one because eating out, even take-out, gets expensive fast.
The young people who sit around me fill their tummies in much easier and delicious way; they order out. And by order out I don’t mean they call up a pizza joint and have them run a pepperoni pie over to the TV station. Oh no, they use a food delivery service to bring them whatever they want. It’s kind of like when you are eight year’s old and you yell to your mom in the other room to make you a “PB and J Sammy” and tell her to be certain to cut away the crust.
I’m not knocking what they do, truth be told I’m a bit envious. I grew up kind of poor (meaning if I wanted something I usually had to get a job and pay for it) so the frugal ways of my youth never did wash away once I got this kind of important job reading the news every night.
I guess what I’m saying is no amount of money would make me change when it comes to choosing between making a sandwich or spending $10.95 to have one brought to me from Applebee’s.
I said I was jealous of my coworkers and their food delivery prowess but recently some of the sting of that envy was taken away by an article I happened upon from a website called USFOODS dot com. The article was all about the explosion of food delivery in our country and gave all the pros and cons of ordering and delivering it.
Everything in the article was about what you’d expect to see until you scrolled down a bit on the page and saw the headline “Deliverers Behaving Badly.” I thought to myself, “What is this going to describe how many food delivery drivers show up late or bring you cold lasagna?”
Nope. They polled a bunch of drivers anonymously and asked them a couple of pointed personal questions.
First they asked have you ever stolen or eaten food from the bag you are delivering? In other words the chicken tenders smelled so good that you said, “Hey, what the heck, I’m hungry, why not.” A shocking 28% of drivers said they eat some of the food they are supposed to deliver. Now obviously they aren’t taking bites out of hot dogs, you’d notice that, but how would you know if a chicken wing or two was missing? And french fries covered in cheese?
As Donnie Brasco would say, “Fuggedaboutit.” You know the guy had his stinky little fingers in those fries.
Another interesting, yet admittedly appalling, fact in the study is that 54% of drivers said they won’t eat your food but they will bring the bag up to their face and smell it. While that’s not offensive it’s just kind of weird.
I laughed out loud when they then asked customers, knowing what I just told you, if they’d like their food delivered in tamper resistant packaging so nobody can eat their spaghetti or whatever they ordered? Turns out only 85% thought that was a good idea. I’d like to know who this other 15% were that said, “Nay, I don’t care if Jimmy from Wing Heaven opens my container and samples a couple garlic parm wings I paid for.”
Sampling food you didn’t pay for really isn’t a new thing. Back in college at worked at a local Stewarts shop with a guy who figured out a way to push on the sides of a box of Freihofer’s chocolate chip cookies and wiggle cookies free.
I’d see him stealing a single cookie from each box on the shelf. When I asked him if he thought what he was doing was wrong he said, “Because I don’t technically break the seal on the box it’s not really a crime.” I told him I was pretty sure the local District Attorney would disagree.
Of course this was the same guy who would take a pre-packaged sub and throw it against the wall and announced, “It’s damaged now so we can’t sell it. He’d then write it off as a loss and have it for lunch.”
I sometimes wonder whatever happened to that guy? Oh, who am I kidding, he’s probably in Congress.
So to circle back to the beginning of this column, I will stick with bringing my baloney and cheese sandwich to work and saving money while my young prodigious protégés hit three buttons on a smartphone and have a gourmet feast laid at their feet.
I guess I’m just a horse and buggy guy in an electric car kind of world. The only solace I take from being old, stubborn and frugal is I know nobody had their hands or nose anywhere near my Oscar Mayer bologna.