I was preparing to make a left-hand turn out of the shopping center onto northbound Jarrettsville Pike — the exact same place I was when these dipshits pulled their dipshitiness.

My cell phone began to vibrate in my pocket. It felt soooo good. Anyway, I checked it thinking I might’ve forgotten a side item or something and the store was calling to tell me to get my ass back right quick before I’d gone too far.

It was a phone number I didn’t recognize — Maryland area code. This is how the conversation went:

Me: “Hello?”

Her: “Hello?”

Me: … “Hello?”

Her: “Hello?”

Me: “Can you hear me?”

Her: “Can you hear me?”

Me: “Yes. Can you hear me?”

Her: “Yes. Can you hear me?”

Realizing I have better things to do with time than listen to someone repeat everything I say over the phone, I hung up and gunned it on my delivery. They didn’t call back. I wonder if I can do a reverse search over WhitePages.com using the phone number to try to figure out who called me.

Or, y’know, not.

I spent the last six hours or so helping this guy move.

(I wish I’d taken the night off from work, because I’ve been having a hankering for grilled hot dogs since last weekend’s grill-party got rained out, and what would you guess is in Neckbone’s backyard? Yep, a grill. Alas.)

This is all I’m going to say: Neckbone, when you have FOUR boxes of shoes to your wife’s ONE … well, that, in fact, is all I am going to say.

(And as if spending hours today climbing in and out of a U-Haul truck wasn’t bad enough, I get home to find a U-Haul truck parked in front of the door to my building. I hope — hope! — that the crazies in apartment B are moving. They’ve been the fourth group of people to live in that apartment since I moved in here, just under three years ago. Place has a fuckin’ curse.)

Greg has instituted a delivery charge, starting last Wednesday (yesterday).

The delivery charge is one dollar. All drivers have recieved a thirty-cents increase on their mileage compensation. This means that I now make a buck-thirty in gas compensation for each delivery I take.

It also means that Greg has cut his out-of-the-store’s-pockets expenses by seventy cents a delivery. I understand that rent is going up, energy costs are going up, and of course both the commissary and Coca-a-Cola are adding the increasing costs of gasoline to what Greg has to pay. So he’s decided the customers need to pick up a bit of those costs — not an unfair expectation, right? Except that since carryout customers don’t pay a delivery charge … it’s the delivery customer base now being expected to subsidize the store’s operating costs. Personally, I’d rather see a price increase.

It’s not that I’m ungrateful for the boost in mileage. Seriously, this should put me comfortably into the black for awhile (let’s see how high gas costs rise in the summer). So far, tonight anyway, the delivery charge didn’t adversely affect my tips — in fact, even discounting the mileage increase, my run average was higher than normal.

My new goal is to talk Greg into giving me a raise. I currently make $6.15 per hour, which is the new minimum wage in Maryland. On one hand, I’m not going to complain about making that. On the other hand, before the wage increase, I was making sixty-cents higher than minimum wage ($5.75 an hour, minimum was $5.15). My arguement is going to be hinged thusly:

First, I’m going to try the “loyal as a dog” routine:

I have worked for you for nearly two years. You are aware that I consistently arrive for my shifts, rarely call out (and then only due to hazzardous weather conditions, family emergencies, and/or involvement in major car accidents), and often work days scheduled or requested off to assist staffing levels. As a driver, I know the area intimately, and am never rude to a customer in their presence. I drive safely and ensure the product arrives to its destination as quickly as possible.

If that doesn’t work, I’ll get mathematical:

1. I take more than one delivery per hour. Factoring out the thirty-cents per run in mileage compensation the store pays, this means the store makes seventy cents per delivery.

2. For every hour I work, I take approximately two and a half deliveries.

2a. This means, that in any given hour, the store is making $1.75 off of the runs that I am delivering.

3. Giving me a raise of .35 cents will do two things.

3a. First, and most important, I will stop yapping your ear off about how I am worth more than minimum wage.
3b. Second, you will still be earning an a dollar forty per hour off the runs I take.

Assuming that doesn’t work … well, we still have the “nuclear option.”

Hey, did you know that if I quit, you don’t have enough drivers to work my shifts?