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December 03 Zen and the art of Phone Book delivery (continued)If you are a career phonebook delivery person like I am, you learn to let go into the job much as you might let go into the ocean, allowing the water to hold you up, rather than fighting the waves and drowning. There is a certain pleasing rhythem to the work. Bagging the books, for example. Each four pack must be broken open and each book placed in its own individual bag, so it goes like this: slash, slash (the action of your knife making a horizontal and a vertical cut in the plastic wrapping), bag (grabbing bag), book (grabbing book from 4-pack), bag (placing book in bag), sling (tossing bagged book into your vehicle): slash, slash bag, book, bag, sling bag, book, bag, sling bag, book, bag, sling bag, book, bag, sling slash, slash... This becomes a mantra for the humble aspiring buddist practitioner; a means for attaining "bare attention," every bit as good as sitting and following one's breath. Near the end of the delivery when the managers at the station are a week behind schedule and due to move on to Phoenix three days ago, the remaining delivery people have greater bargaining power. The people who actually watched the training video dropped out after their first route. That video remains the same year after year and every delivery outfit shows the same one: the camera zooms in on an unnaturally cheerful delivery person walking carefully up the sidewalk to a home and placing a bagged phone book to the left side of the door, aligning it neatly with the hinge. This is great comedy and never fails to amuse me each time I see it. What starry eyed dreamers those management people are! Do they really believe that the scruffy pack of derelicts watching the video are going to perform these actions 300-500 times for, at most, 23 cents a book? Hell, you can't even get the postman to bring a one ounce letter to your mail box for less than 37 cents, and yet they think they are going to get 5 pound books delivered to the door for less than a quarter. Everytime at the end of the video, I always raise my hand and looking as innocent and eager to do a good job as I possibly can, I ask, "Does this technique apply to rural routes?" The manager will look down and shuffle his feet for a moment, contemplating my question. Then he'll say, "No, we don't expect you to walk a quarter mile down the road to farmhouses. In such situations you may leave the book to one side of the drive on the main road." How magnanimous of them! Every route I do is then transformed automaticly into a rural one. I will contemplate a grid of inner city streets - jam packed with houses - and in my mind's eye I will see it as it once was - open prairie with a redtail hawk or two flying overhead. I can hear the call of a meadow lark in the field right across from where I stand at the corner of "walk" and "don't walk." What the hell? The folks at the distribution center don't know any better. They just got here two days ago and will be gone in two weeks. This ruralization technique allows me to drive my car down the wrong side of the street, tossing a phone book in each driveway much as you might throw newspapers on a delivery route. I can do a route by myself in the same amount of time that TWO people who have watched the video would take to accomplish it. The pay is horrible enough as it is on "rural" routes. People who do as they are told on city and suburban routes drop out of the delivery business like flies. I don't blame them. Good thing I'm smart enough to only take "rural" areas. So today I walk into the delivery station. The city was supposed to have been finished three days ago and the manager should be staring out his window at a saguaro cactus instead of looking at me. Things are just a touch frantic. Natural selection has winnowed out the folks who did as they were told and left only me and a couple of other scoff-laws to deliver the remaining one million phone books. I stroll insolently over to the stack of still undelivered routes and pick out the most miserable one I can find - 700 books for a town called "Woodland Park" 20 snowy miles up a winding mountain pass away. I pick up the route sheets and take them over to the manger's desk where I let them go from my hand. The pages hit the metal table where he sits hunched nervously over a computer printout showing all the undelivered routes with a soft "thslaping" sound. It's payback time. "I'll get rid of this one for you for 50 cents a book," I tell him in an indifferent tone. "Sure, we can do that," he responds, with his artificial grin looking even more false than it did on day one of this fiasco. "And I'll need double the gas 'bonus'," I inform him. He hesitates for a micro-second and then caves in, "Sure, we'll put it in the contract!" Paul(a) Newman would have been proud. Revenge is sweet. _________________ Comments (4)
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