March 17, 2009

The Fine Art of Delivering Phone Books - Part II

Last week I started to tell you about the time I decided to join the Few, the Proud, the Phone Book Deliverers. I had passed the initial rigorous screening (I could prove that I had a pulse) and I had clawed my way through nearly 45 minutes of arduous training. Now I was ready to take to the streets.

I have always been ambitious, and I was more than a little bit broke, so I had signed up for 10 routes. At 200 addresses per route and 11 cents per successfully delivered book, this meant that after just ringing some door bells and saying, “Madam, I hold in my hands a brand new phone book, yours to enjoy with my compliments,” I stood to bring home a cool $220!

When I picked up my route sheets, I began to sense that there were a few aspects of this whole project that I had not really grasped. For one thing, the sheaf of names, all sorted by street address, contained around 2,000 addresses, and added up to something like 70 pages.

That’s a lot of door bells.

And then there were the books themselves. At a little more than a pound per book, my 2,000 weighed well over a ton. It took six spring-crushing trips in my 1968 Volkswagen microbus to get them all home.

Nevertheless, I set out the next day with a set of route sheets, a trusty old VW creaking under the weight of phone books and high hopes.

The first problem cropped up at my first stop, when an elderly woman came to the door but refused to open it. I could hear her muffled shouting: “What do you want?”

“Madam,” I shouted back, “I hold in my hands a brand new phone book, yours to enjoy . . .”

“What?”

“I said, ‘I hold in my hands . . .’”

“What?”

“Phone book. I have your new phone book!”

“What?”

“Maybe if you open the door . . .”

“I can’t hear you with the door closed! Go away!”

“But I’m supposed to give it to you in person!”

“Go away!”

I put her book in a plastic bag with “Let Your Fingers Do The Walking” elegantly silkscreened on the outside, shouted “Thank you!” and moved on.

Except for the woman who wanted me to come in and take a look at her garbage disposal and the man who came to the door wearing a scarlet leotard (he thought I would probably be interested in seeing his collection of Hummel figurines) this was pretty much the reception I got at the next 20 houses.

The second problem I had was that I couldn’t very easily carry more than about five books at a time without having some of them sail unceremoniously into the bushes, so I was making a lot of trips back and forth to the van. By mid-afternoon I had delivered about 30 books and I was exhausted, so I went home to rest, think, and enjoy a brain food lunch (a peanut butter sandwich and a beer).

When I passed a Kroger parking lot on the way back to my route that afternoon, the brain food kicked in and I solved the problem of how to tote all those books. It seems that you can easily get about 20 or 30 phone books in a shopping cart, and if you don’t steal one with a screwed-up wheel it will roll up and down the street just fine.

And so for the next three weeks I rattled from house to house, diligently updating each occupant’s access to the latest business and residential contact data. I filled out my 70 pages of paperwork, turned it in, and ultimately picked up a paycheck big enough to buy my wife’s birthday present. I even had enough left over to buy the parts to repair the van’s suspension.

And yes, I did return that cart to the Kroger parking lot.  

What’s the worst job you’ve ever had? Send an email to crappyjob@learnedsofar.com, and tell me all about it.

Copyright ©2009 Michael Ball. Distributed exclusively by North Star Writers Group.

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