[Elspode]

I've actually found myself enjoying the delivery job, 404. Even most of the "Happy Chores" aren't too bad, for the most part. I don't have any immediate plans to carry a weapon, though. I'm not real sure if Papa John's forbids it or not.

It was an interesting day overall, actually. It started out with a trip downtown to report for jury duty at the Jackson County Circuit Court. I have been a registered voter for 30 years, and a licensed driver for 32, and I have only been called for jury duty one other time, about five years ago. Despite having spent five hours sitting in the Jury Room today, I *still* have yet to be selected to serve. I was selected as a Reserve Juror before being sent away today, but the chances of me being recalled before Friday are virtually nil (they have only called on Reserve Jurors twice in 30 months).

For my service, I received a certificate and a check which exceeded my costs of getting there, parking and eating lunch by about 34 cents. My boss was pretty happy, because they weren't keeping me. He essentially ordered me to get dismissed ("Do whatever it takes to get out of it..."), because I am responsible for our year-end inventory, which takes place on Wednesday/Thursday. Unfortunately, there was no way I was going to be dismissed prior to the selection process, so had I been selected, I would have had to go all the way to the voir dire process before I could have said or done anything to get me dismissed. That would have been a tough nut for me, because I'd actually like to have a chance to sit on a jury sometime. I'm at least that patriotic.

After leaving our Art Deco, 75 year old courthouse (dedicated by then-Senator Harry Truman), I went on to work for three hours. That was interesting, after having been gone since midday Wednesday, when I went home with the flu. Fortunately, we've been so slow lately, that I really wasn't all that far behind, and I should be completely caught up by tomorrow noon.

I actually went back to work on Saturday night, delivering pizzas. I did pretty well, all in all, although had I been able to work Friday, I probably would have made a killing. According to all accounts, it was a complete madhouse, with the manager calling in drivers and kitchen staff from other locations due to the volume of business. At one point, they apparently had *16* drivers on the clock! By Saturday, though, things were steady, if not entirely crazed.

Merle has become more conversational again, although his topic doesn't vary much. On Saturday, and again tonight, he shared some of his notions for making his ex wife's life more, um...interesting. Suffice to say that his ideas for doing so mostly involve fairly pedestrian, juvenile sorts of things ("Patrick, do you know if it is illegal to dump shit on someone's front porch?") When he said he might just send some dead roses, I told him that he was probably asking for trouble, since these days, all someone has to do is *claim* that they feel threatened, and one could be branded a stalker or something...especially a male; most especially an ex-spouse. Besides, I told him, if she's as big a scumbag as you've made her out to be, she probably won't know if the dead roses and/or shit weren't already there.

As Merle mused about sending his wife a box of chocolates with Ex-Lax in them, he thumbed through a catalogue featuring numerous imported "fantasy decor" items. You know the type...cheapass swords, dragon sculptures in resin, feng-shui rock garden indoor fountains...that sort of thing. I asked him where he got it, and he told me that Wes, one of the newer drivers, was selling things out of it. Apparently, Wes is quite the entrepreneur. The first night I met him, he was trying to fix up Merle with some Hispanic hookers he claimed to "know", and he's told Merle that he also has a highly lucrative Internet porn site.

I find both of the sexually oriented enterprises to be dubious claims at best, as Wes' outward intellect seems to be stretched just delivering pizzas on most nights. A man of unremarkable appearance, Wes is ostensibly thirty-something, with hair thinning on the top, and a bit of a hickish edge to him. He has a sort of soft, mumbling manner of speaking, making him both difficult to hear, and not very convincing as a potential 'Net pimp. I suppose it is possible that he's just working a delivery job in order to have some outward form of legitimate enterprise, but frankly, I believe that selling imported crap out of catalogues is probably as risque as this guy's life ever gets.

My runs were easy breezy tonight, very little backtracking or screwing around. I didn't get stiffed once, and ended up making the best total tips so far. While the job doesn't have a whole lot of benefits in the way of perks or cash (well, free small pizzas), there is the whole "eye-candy" aspect to fall back on.

People can be fairly unrestrained when they answer the door for the pizza guy. A couple of weeks back, I made a delivery to a slumber party of high school cheerleaders, all dressed as young girls dress these days, and all terribly bouncy and boisterous. Tonight, a young woman answered the door in about 2.5 ounces of some incredibly tight, vanishingly thin material which covered only the most critical areas of her jaw-droppingly appealing frame. And she tipped me $2.50 to boot! At another stop, a cheesy apartment building, the door was opened by a kid of about 20, revealing several very nice guitars hanging from the wall. I said admiring things, and was quickly invited in to give them the once-over. I also got tipped $2.00, for a delivery that was less than two minutes from the shop. On the downside, the apartment smelled pretty strongly of ether, so I hope the kid isn't a tweaker - although the Strats, Les Paul and Epi 12-string, plus the Schechter bass would tend to make me believe that he probably was.

It was unreasonably cold tonight, and very windy to boot. I have to find a way to keep warm while delivering, without being too hot when I'm in the store itself, standing next to the pizza oven from Hell. I'm sure most of you will say, "Wear a coat, dumbass!", but I'd rather have something a bit easier to deal with. I don't want to have to take it off and put it on over and over and over...

And so it goes...