Samatha the Pizza Lady

I am a bad girl who forgot to post last week. I did set a calendar event to remind me this week, though. Here you go!

~Rebecca

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Samantha looked at the receipts tucked into the pizza boxes Jarod turned around for her. Receipts, plural, meaning this was a double. Both addresses were more or less inside city limits, which explained why he’d promised to let her go afterward. A, it would probably take a full hour to make the round trip, and B, no one else on shift tonight was willing to make late night deliveries to town since that trouble a few weeks back. She sighed and loaded the orders into separate heated pizza bags. Oh, well. The townies did have a tendency to tip well which might be enough to pull tonight’s average out of the “just barely covered my expenses” range and into “have money left over to add to the stash”. In this profession, tips were king.

Like most pizza joints in the US, Jarod’s drivers were paid minimum wage while in the store, but only while in the store. Once she was routed, and she already was since she already had the receipts, she was officially off the clock and no longer making an hourly wage. Instead, she would get five percent of the base order price in commission. Not the full sticker price, only the price before taxes and the delivery fee was added. To make a buck a run, the customer had to order twenty bucks in just food, which meant twenty-five in total price. Hence the reason tips were king to pizza delivery drivers.

The first house was nothing too unusual for Talbot’s Peak. Granted, it did have a gargoyle/demon thing sitting on the wall right outside the driveway, and that thing had a motion sensor that made its eyes light up when a vehicle approached. It had scared the shit out of her the first time she’d delivered here. It also turned on the porch and driveway lights. She could deal with creepy red LED eyes if it meant not having to stumble around in the dark to find the front door. That customer was always happy to chat for a few minutes, and she was always happy to listen to him rattle on about his newest oddball creation in exchange for the ten dollar tip he tended to give drivers he liked.

The next address was a new one to her. She consulted the Google app on her phone while she was in an area she knew had good service, memorized the route, and then shut the app down so it wouldn’t siphon her battery down to nothing if she went into a roaming area. Most of Montana was a roaming area for Sprint, she’d discovered. She turned the radio up a bit when the theme song for “The Peak After Dark” drifted from the speakers. According to Google Maps, it would take her a good fifteen minutes to get to the semi rural bar with her load of ten extra-large Mega Meaty pizzas. Might as well listen to what movie Ralph Bruin was going to make fun of tonight. Odds were about fifty-fifty that they wouldn’t rerun New Year’s Eve’s review of Star Wars yet again. For some reason, fans of the show kept requesting it instead of requesting songs, but it seemed to be tapering down somewhat.