Submitted 1 month ago by Track_Shovel@slrpnk.net to [deleted]
https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/0b3fbd12-7328-4138-8ec5-926ed975a975.jpeg
I really liked being a pizza delivery driver pre-GPS. It did require some skill, but you learned quickly about how things work:
It was easily the best “shitty job” I’ve ever had.
I remember buying my first mapsco and thinking: well shit, I literally can’t get lost now…
Apartments and multi tenant buildings in my country have numbers in a pattern, 1001 bottom first floor first to the left, 1002 next…1101 next floor same etc etc
Finding the right apartment even without a name of the owner becomes a breeze.
Do you think the postal and delivery workers have learnt this? …nope…
Pizza goes cold, packages (usually) not.
Thank you for your service 🫡
The thin bread line separates not only the hungry from the fed but the men from the boys too. It has a higher casualty rate than being a police officer.
Same. I loved the independence of it. But it didn’t pay enough to cover the repair bills it generated.
That, and each driver would cover a specific area within the delivery range. It’s not like they would have to read a map that fast for an address in an area they didn’t already have practically memorized.
I was in the burbs so we all covered the whole thing.
In my city:
all the addresses are the same on all the parallel streets,
“East” and “West” are all separated by the same long North-South Boulevard,
even numbered express/highways will take you East/West, odd numbered North/South.
Lots of other stuff I’ve since forgotten, but I went from not knowing the city to knowing it by heart in a couple of months.
Now I do longer haul deliveries so I know areas far from where I live. I spend my time scoping out potential restaurants/areas for day trips or vacations.
By the end of the century, modern fantasies is just going to be the 90s.
Already is
Has been for years.
They also stopped doing the 30-minute thing because they kept getting sued over the wrecks caused by trying to meet the 30-minute deadline.
When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens.
So that’s where the idea in SnowCrash comes from!
and the reason they stopped delivering within 30 minutes was cause it led to reckless driving and many, many, many traffic accidents and losses of life.
I didn’t know that, crazy.
Yeah pre internet lots of shit was easy to ignore.
Yep. There were many wrongful death lawsuits as well, i think which resulted in millions of dollars of payouts to families, and all the coverage really hit domino’s reputation to the point they finally dropped the half hour guarantee in the mid 90s because of the financial blows from reputation loss and settlements.
Though I wouldnt be surprised if they try to bring it back via drone deliveries.
And now we will never have the beginning of Snow Crash happen irl. Damn.
“The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallow subcategory.”
I just reread that intro and it’s so over-the-top awesome
ex land pirate here … we’d keep a map of the city on the wall for reference but it seemed like most of the drivers just remembered where places were if they’d been working there for any amount of time … I answered phones and made the pizzas when it was still ok to throw the dough up in the air, etc. fun job
Hang on. They don’t throw the dough up in the air anymore?!?!?!?
There’s a pizza dough spreader machine now. Makes it more consistent.
Smaller places often still throw the dough, but chains usually have the machine so every pizza is the same.
Like others have said, we had a big map. One thing I remembered though is how fucking often I would forget somebody’s 2-liter of Pepsi or whatever. I would just stop and buy one on the way, and then later grab one from work and take it home.
I didn’t work for Dominos, but I did spend a year delivering pizza for a different place when I was in college in the late '80s. We had the big laminated map of the area, but after a little bit we’d pretty much know every street and recognize the regulars.
And if you couldn’t pay for the pizza, they’d have sex with you
Sometimes they’d cut a hole in the middle and stick their dick in the pizza though which was weird.
Is that a guarantee?
I have three local places that still deliver using their own guy and I order exclusively from them. It limits my options, but fuck the delivery apps. Anywhere else, I either dine in or pick it up myself.
I do the same. If anyone uses those stupid apps I consider them to be lazy bitches.
“unskilled labor”
Not this again.
“Unskilled labor” means that you do not need special skills to apply for the job; you will be trained on the spot.
So every management job is unskilled?
So when I pay your mom for feet pics, she’s working and an unskilled labourer?
I don’t think the difference is the minimum education for entry.
I’d say the difference is how much of your paycheck is because of you specifically and how much is for just general labor.
So a physics researcher job is “skilled” because most of the pay is because the specific researcher knows about physics.
But a waiter job is “unskilled” since the skills needed to do the job are the skills needed for basically any job:
Of those, only physical endurance and people skills are “exclusive” to being a waiter. There are some actual jobs that require no physical endurance. And some jobs don’t require as much people skills as being a waiter does. But the rest of them are general across basically every job.
Of course, "unskilled job"s do require skills, I just listed a bunch of them. But most of those skills, any other worker that does any other job would have. Therefore I count payment for those skills as payment for “general labor” and not “payment for you specifically”.
you do not need special skills to apply for the job
That’s definitely the economic definition.
But the colloquial definition is that you don’t need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).
And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.
I worked in the kitchen and did deliveries the summer after I graduated high school.
We had a map under a piece of plexiglass on the counter. You’d have to look at it and memorize wear you were going before you left.
We didn’t have a 30 minute or it’s free deal, but there was still pressure to deliver fast. Driving their car too fast, I hit the hump in the middle of an intersection and became briefly airborne. All four tires left the street.
That’s rough, at least i had a crappy photocopy to work with haha
And the pizza actually tasted better than it does today.
The science of embalming food hadn’t progressed as far at that point.
And health codes didn’t stop them from filling it with all sorts of other stuff, and nobody looked to see that there were 5 sticks of butter and two handfuls of salt in each pizza.
no shit, food in 1960 was full of additional flavoring chemicals.
And it was incredibly affordable compared to today.
prices didn’t go up, wages went down.
I mean prices also went up
Imagine not being able to look things up on your phone the instant you think of them
You’d have a notebook with you to write it down for later.
But yeeeaahh…No bueno for getting it now.
I was one of those land pirates, once upon a time- and after a few weeks on the job we didn’t need the paper maps, either.
Pizza dude's got thirty seconds.
Wise man say, “forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza.”
They also didn’t charge you $20 just so the franchise can pocket it.
After the internet too.
I delivered pizzas for quite some time and we had a map on the wall laid out like a road map with grids.
Order came in, address matched to grid, find the address and go.
Our slower drivers would use gps or maps. The good ones just knew the area.
A map at the start, sure, I’d bet these drivers had “The Knowledge” like a London cabbie.
I delivered pizzas in college. In my city I used to be able to tell you what subdivision you lived in, what side of the street you lived on, and the nearest cross road, just by the address.
Used to do it myself. The pizza place I worked for gave me a map of the town and said cya. Once went to the wrong street on literally the other side of town because close to same name streets but one was “drive” and the other was “ave” and I was tired.
And you know what else kids? The food was actually good!
I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they’re legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.
Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn’t know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn’t believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person’s voice confirming they’d received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you.
Sometimes it was 31 minutes, and free
Where the heck is 122 and an eighth?
Would you believe it’s right after 121 and 7th? Not 121 and 8th that leads to the one way bike path. Obviously. And if you make that mistake you have to use 3 highway ramps on perfect conjunction to get back there. Crossing all lanes for each exit.
As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn’t even need that
I still grab the latest highway maps from rest stops. What I haven’t seen, that used to be in almost every gas station and convenience store, were the multi-page county atlases. Damn things would set you back $15-20 a pop but you’d look up a street name, get the page and grid location, then work backward to whatever highway you were taking. We had a stack of them in my buddy’s work van and used them to get to everywhere. Navigating DC by paper map was an experience.
“ADC the Map People” made the ones for the DC/Maryland/Virginia area but stopped in 2010. It looks like they probably also made those massive wall maps used by the local pizza joints too. Doesn’t seem like anyone makes anything similar to them now. Makes me wonder what LEO/Fire/EMS does now; they used to all carry atlases for their service area - even just as a fallback after GPS became widely available.
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called AllSafe J/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.
It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
the land before the techbro company that adds very little value got rich by putting themselves in the middle, scamming clients and exploiting workers, while making them angry with each other.
“progress”
Where I live it’s still like this minus the map (they don’t need one)
Childhood memories unlocked! They even made time for the best 4th grade field trip ever 🤤
We got to make our own tiny pizza 🍕
What was yours?
I always enjoy staring at this exact framed photo any time I’m waiting at my local Domino’s. It really gives me that Saturday night pizza feeling.
In some countries it’s still a thing…well without the paper map
Pavidus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Something that seems immediately apparent to me is that these folks are not fresh high school students. Adults used to work these jobs.
SGforce@lemmy.ca 1 month ago
I can’t even remember what jobs teenagers were supposed to have. Newspaper delivery? Ice cream bike guy? That’s all I got.
lime@feddit.nu 1 month ago
teenagers as a group designation used to not be a thing. you were a child until you could do adult jobs and then you were an adult.
children would have menial jobs like coal miner, day labourer, the guy who sticks their hand into the mechanical loom when it gets stuck…
LaserTurboShark69@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
Bagging groceries. That job doesn’t even exist anymore
xav@programming.dev 1 month ago
How about none ? You’re a teen, you just need to learn, socialize and have fun. Don’t work before your an adult.
somethingsnappy@lemmy.world 1 month ago
If you didn’t mow lawns, you were never a tween/teen.
redwattlebird@thelemmy.club 1 month ago
Lemonade stands
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
And they were a proper fleet who has delivered in the same areas for years, making them extremely experienced in navigating those streets.
Pavidus@lemmy.world 1 month ago
This also led to better customer service. You had a relationship with your driver.
Fmstrat@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Sort of. I did this at 16-18.
Also, one person didn’t do all that, still doesn’t. Phones, oven, and delivery are all separate jobs, with phones and oven overlapping during slow shifts.