At Your Earliest Inconvenience

I work from home, but my job has hard deadlines, which means I have a lunch break from 12:00 to 12:30 pm within my eight-hour workday.

A few times a month, I splurge on restaurant-delivered food via a delivery app where a “worker” will go to the restaurant, pick up the food, and deliver it to me. They’ve been great in the past and have a large number of restaurants to order from… until recently.

I order early in the morning to get it out of the way, specifying delivery from 11:45 am to 12:15 pm.

One day, I ordered burgers and fries. The driver showed up at 11:15 am, forcing us to eat lunch early because that’s not really something you can reheat. I complained to the company and got a small “refund.”

I thought everything was fine, and it was a one-time mistake… until today.

I order early again, pizza, to be delivered from 11:45 am to 12:15 pm. The app has a tracking feature that shows where my driver is. At 11:30 am, I see he’s right outside my house, despite the fact that I gave an instruction to not deliver before 11:45 am. 

I go to the door to get the food, mad, only to find the driver sitting there in his car. I open the door. He sees me. He then drives off. I check the app and see that he drove down the road and stopped.

Fifteen minutes later, he drives back, parks, and delivers the food. I take the food but refuse to thank him as I usually do. They’re lucky the tip is calculated when the order is placed, because he wouldn’t have gotten a dime from me.