[Elspode]

Thanks for the pizza tales! Gives me something to shoot for.

Tonight was my second night, and I don't have a lot to say about it. It was mostly delivering pizzas, strangely enough. And making boxes. No new cardboard cuts...I'm getting more skilled already!

The steel-melting spotlight was a *definite* good idea. Shaved a lot of time off of my fruitless gyrating in the dark, looking for addresses. Having a job like this *really* demonstrates to me just how much advancing age is affecting my senses. The drivers' table (where we punch in and out on the computer, stuff the orders into the big insulated bags, and make up boxes) is right next to the oven, and the oven is both hot *and* noisy. This makes it really hard for my ever-lessening aural discrimination abilities to pick out what is being said to me from across the restaurant. Worse yet is the fact that the map, the only thing that stands between me and ending up in Cleveland when on a delivery, is *just* far enough away that I can't read it...not even with my glasses. Therefore, I just get a general idea about the area into which I'm headed, then go out and translate that rapidly fading memory onto the indecipherable photocopy they gave me on Monday. So far, I've only gotten badly lost once.

It was really busy when I got there, so I didn't get to do more than pass a few words with Merle. In fact, he was equally as quiet and solemn tonight as he was rambling and outraged on Monday. Perhaps I won't need to have that talk with him about the meds after all?

I met a couple of other people I hadn't met before. One of them, whom I shall call Brad (does anyone want to guess *why* I'm going to call him Brad?) is a late twentysomething dude, with closely cropped reddish hair and a boisterous sort of attitude. I liked him right off. It did not harm my opinion of him at all when I pulled in from my second delivery and he called me over to the trunk of his car to show off the new set of katanas he'd just bought at some import place. I mean, I'm sure they're shite and all, but they were pretty, and really, who the hell wouldn't like someone who shows off their ninja hardware in the parking lot of a pizza place?

I only ended up working three and a half hours, which was actually fine with me. I did not care to mop the floor again, thanks, and so I was relieved not to have to close again. The downside of the short night is that I made only $10 in tips. It would have only been $9.95 if it hadn't been for the generosity of the woman who presented me with $15.25 for her $15.20 tab and said, "That's okay...keep it". Oh my. A whole shiny nickel? Oh, how I wish penny loafers were still in fashion! I could find another customer like her and have one for *each* shoe! Still and all, that was five cents more than I got from my first five pizzas.

The champion tipper tonight? The drunk on his ass guy who was apparently living with his mother (too many big stuffed bunny things and other Home Interiors type decor inside to be *his* home) in the duplex part of town. While I hastily tried to remember how to properly count back change, he shoved a couple of ones into my hand and said, "Here ya go, man" in a boozy slur. Trust me...he needed to eat.