Tales From the Road II: Vignettes

The following is a TSF free post. If you want access to our comment box & community, subscribers-only posts, The Friday Roundup, and the full post archives including this one, you can grab all of that for just $5 a month (or even less on an annual plan) by subscribing right here:

Writing is how I make my living, so if you like what you see here, please support my work by subscribing!

If you’ve already subscribed but would like to buy me a coffee to help keep me fueled up for writing, you can do that here:

---

228 hours. 3,932 miles, 447 trips. 27 days straight, not a single day with no deliveries. $3,630 earned - before gas, wear and tear, taxes, and expenses. After all, I’m 1099, and all the liability and maintenance is my responsibility.

The luster is wearing off the job some now, but I still feel the call to keep going back out, trying to score the best offers.

On a Friday, refusing a garbage offer drops my acceptance rate to 69% on DoorDash - 1% below the 70% threshold to maintain my Platinum status. Then I take another percentage hit because an offer comes in while I have the app paused — which is supposed to be technically impossible. Frustrated, I contact support, but they say they are powerless to do anything about it. This drop can be fixed if I accept enough crap orders to get out of purgatory, but it’s not a 1:1 ratio. I’ll have to take several offers to move up a single percentage point, and I won’t get to be picky about them, even if they’re money-losers for me. If I don’t, however, I lose access to my hard-earned Platinum benefits, which includes being able to work whenever I want (without having to wait for slots to become available) and have access to the best-paying offers with the highest tips. In a city with an estimated 86,000 dashers, these benefits equate to real dollars if I’m going to work for DoorDash. Although I’m not at all certain DoorDash knows what the words “high-paying offer” actually mean

I don’t want to have to eat more garbage deliveries. I don’t want to be paid $3.75 to go 4.1 miles so I can spend 10 minutes trying to navigate some labyrinthine apartment complex carrying a paper bag from from McDonalds while I try to find a specific apartment number among a sea of non-sequential, illogical apartment numbers. It’s like trying to find a needle in a stack of needles. I make a video a couple days later to illustrate just one example of the problem:

For days, I’ve been thinking about creating a YouTube channel to help people working delivery gigs learn the ins and outs of the job that can only be gleaned from experience. I’m so frustrated with DoorDash’s system of penalization for not taking bad offers that I want to make a video about how I already quit working for them after just a few weeks, but I don’t have time or energy for getting something like that set up. I’m too busy working.

I switch my workload to Uber Eats, which doesn’t penalize me for not taking the worst offers, and I stick with it until Sunday morning, when things are a bit slow. Since I never make the ‘I quit’ video, I’m not committed to the boycott. I need more orders, so I decide to give DoorDash another shot, just in case.

The first order is a coffee run, but I only have to go a few miles. The second is a trip to some Liquor store in the hood, where I pick up cans of Bud Light in a black plastic bag, and have to call a second customer to ask if she’s willing to take half a dozen tallboys of some beverage called Cayman Jack, because they’re sold out of the dozen smaller cans she ordered. She sounds exasperated, but agrees. Another black plastic bag gets handed to me.

I load up and head off, stopping first to drop off the beer to a man with a deep tan, tattooed forearms, and sunglasses under a meshback cap. As he stands next to his pickup truck in the driveway, I transition, chameleon-like, into complaining about having to scan and verify his ID with my phone because I work for a corporation full of “fucking lawyers,” and he laughs in a voice that sounds like he has cigarettes for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and tells me I don’t have to worry about him. Good. That means I’ve done my job of convincing him we’re on the same team. Then I’m off to deliver the tallboys of Cayman Jack to a blonde with bad teeth in a zip-up hoodie who can’t trouble herself to pause her gossipy phone conversation while I verify her ID and ask her to sign a box like an Etch-a-Sketch on my screen.

After all, I’m just a delivery driver, no better than hired help. No need to pretend like I’m a human being.

A silver-haired woman in a multi-million dollar house answers her door reluctantly as I drop off some food. She has no idea about the order, but I’m at the right address, so it’s presumably for someone staying with her. I ask if I can hand her the items, and she makes some scoffing remark about her hands being full, then acts like a martyr for taking it anyway, as she asks me, “What’s all this?” I tell her it’s “Dinner for Lindsey,” hoping that means something to her. A knowing look crosses her face, and she takes it, seeming annoyed, and closes the door.

I’m sorry to have troubled you, ma’am, with this order that was placed from your home. I am just the delivery driver. I do not generate these inconveniences on my own.