Notes From the Road: Adventures at KFC

How to pay for jewel encrusted teeth, and other stories

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Now, to today’s post…

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Money’s been tight. The assisted living home we own in Arizona has lost five residents to death or relocation in the past couple months, and that’s cut our revenue in half. That means it went from paying a good chunk of our bills to paying pretty much none, since everything we make goes back into the business when we’re not at full capacity. It takes time to find new residents. But the clock on bills coming due never stops.

So I’ve been scrambling. Not getting much sleep. Too busy. Too worried. Wracking my brain trying to figure out how to not just get out of the hole, but get ahead.

I’ve been applying for jobs, but nothing has materialized. I’ve only gotten one interview, for a position doing package delivery for Amazon. They all but hired me on the spot, considering their turnover rate is about 70%, but they keep dropping the ball on actually giving me a start date. It’s been two weeks and I’m getting tired of chasing them. I’ve followed up three times and still haven’t received my onboarding information.

Maybe the universe, or God, or whoever, is trying to send me a message. Maybe this isn’t the path.

All I know is that I can’t afford to wait, so I’m trying to make something happen on my own.

To tackle this, I’ve been dividing my days. The daytime hours are dedicated to making content — posts here, incremental progress on a couple of book projects, a video or two, the outline for an online course. Around dinner time, I switch gears, leave my desk, and head out to do my second shift. For about 6 hours every night, I go out doing the one job I can do at any time: delivering food for UberEats. I run that gig every night until about 10PM, come home and grab some late dinner.

Go to bed. Rinse, repeat.

In the immortal words of Sergeant Roger Murtaugh, “I’m too old for this shit!”

Some nights I make some decent change. Some nights are garbage. You never know how it’s going to go until you do the run.

I have a driver companion app that tracks my mileage and earnings automatically. It also provides insights into which areas of the city are paying the most money per gig, based on the aggregated data of all the drivers in the system.

I don’t know Raleigh well at all, so I can’t vet the suggestions. But making more sounds good.

I decide to get cute and follow what the app tells me. I fire it up, find the neighborhood it says is paying the best, and head that way. I lose thirty minutes to rush hour traffic, but hope I can make it up on the other end if the gigs are as good as the app says.

Turns out the neighborhood in question is an arts district in Durham, not far from Duke University. But it’s a very mixed neighborhood. Some of it features beautiful reclaimed brick factory buildings, turned into shops and creative spaces. These are accompanied by the sharp, clean lines of new office construction. The rest, though, is pretty run down. Older. Typical urban, low-income housing.

I’ve done this job enough to know that this is not a good sign. People in the hood still order food through online apps, but these typically aren’t the higher-value, higher-tip orders you get in upscale neighborhoods where folks are ordering fast casual or better. And of course, when orders come from the hood, you have to deliver in the hood, with all that goes with that. Last week there was a story on the local news: “72 hours, 5 shootings, 3 dead, 5 injured in Durham.” Again, I don’t know the area at all, but it seems to be a mix of good and bad.

Have to keep my head on a swivel.

Offers for deliveries start coming in on the app. All of them are for fast food. The vast majority are for Kentucky Fried Chicken. I’m not exaggerating when I say I got about 15 KFC offers in a row. At first, I turn them down one after, playing the Uber Eats equivalent of whack-a-mole. I’ve learned to avoid fast food pickups whenever possible. They’re typically low-paying, the deliveries are often long drives to challenging locations, and there’s almost always a problem at the restaurant that slows you don’t. But there comes a point where your acceptance rate takes too much of a hit if you keep declining the incoming offers, and then you miss out on better ones as the algorithm punishes you for your lack of participation. So I finally accept one that will only pay me $5. The one upside is, the destination is just a mile away.

Guess I’ll just break the seal and get this over with quickly, I thought. Maybe better offers will come in after I throw a pinch of incense to the fried chicken gods.

So I make a u-turn and zip over to the KFC. When I get inside, I make two quick observations:

1. I am the only white person here.

2. The other five or six people in the place are all waiting for orders, and at least half of them look like delivery drivers. (You can tell this by the way they hold their phones to keep the order screen accessible.)

Nobody in the place is eating. Everyone looks tired of waiting. It’s a bad sign. So is the fact that it takes several minutes for anyone to even acknowledge me. When they finally do, I give them the name on the order, and they lie to my face, telling me it’ll be out in just a minute.

Sure, Jan.

I sidle off to the side to wait. More people come in. One of them is a dude who shows up looking like he just stepped out of a hip hop video. He’s about 30 years old, goatee, and has at least 2 pounds of bling hanging around his neck. Big old fat medallions and heavy jewel-encrusted chains. He’s dressed casually in sweatpants and a gray hoodie, and he’s got dark, wraparound shades on even though the sun has already dipped below the horizon.

That’s a LOT of cubic zirconia, I think.

“You waitin’ to order?” he asks me. I tell him I’m good, and thank him for asking. I make some lame joke about waiting. He laughs and says something back I can’t understand. But that doesn’t matter. We’ve established rapport. Cool? Cool.

Another homie comes in, short, thin dreads peeking out from under a beanie. Skinny as a post. Looks to be about 19. Bling Boy starts talking to Skinny. I’m not really listening, but I don’t get the sense that they know each other.

My ears perk up when I hear them talk about their respective grills. Bling-boy says, “Not gonna lie, errthing ‘round my neck is fake. All ‘dis? ‘Bout two-hunnet dollas. But this?” Points to his teeth. “Ten thousand dollas.” Skinny says, “Mine about two.” I’m fascinated by this exchange. And by the desire for jewel-encrusted teeth, which is utterly mystifying to me. To think I spent nearly that much on my Invisaligns, and they’re not even fancy. Bling-boy’s teeth give him a slight lisp, and I wonder if that even bothers him.

Then Bling-boy starts talking about where he got the money. “I used to drive truck,” he says. “I wind up out in Cali. Bro asks me, ‘You wanna make some money?’ I’m like, ‘yeah.’ He say, ‘Gonna be a truck at this address. Go get it. There’ll be an address in there and a phone. Drive there…Whatever you do, don’t look in the back. When you get where you’re going, call the number in the phone.’”