How To Train Your Delivery Driver

In my opinion, there are two types of delivery driver.

Unfortunately for the people populating the glamorous world of delivering parcels, they seem to be at entirely opposite ends of the Delivery Driver Spectrum. (This is of course a perfectly acceptable term for measuring delivery drivers, ask anyone you know).

The first type is a real treat, but is generally few and far between (as all the best treats seem to be)…Think winning anything more than a tenner on the lottery, or finding a fiver and a book of stamps in an old purse.  Or gleefully discovering an old twix (other yummy chocolate is available) stuffed down next to the crusty old box of boring cereal that is only there for when The Parent comes to stay, then finding out it’s still in date and only slightly crushed and mangled!

What is this real treat?  Well, of course it’s a delivery man so good looking that it’s positively criminal to keep him locked up in a van entertaining only the motorways of Britain for the majority of his day.  A guy who’s courteous and smiles when he hands over your parcel, and says thank you when you’ve signed. A guy who has to scrabble about in a dusty, grubby van hauling boxes about yet still manages to look artfully dishevelled and pulls off that perfect amount of ‘griminess’ before he reaches downright scruffbuckets dirtbag status where you wouldn’t touch him with a bargepole! Mmmmm, a real licky-neck type of guy!

Now I was lucky enough to know one such specimen in my old job…We had a beautiful man pop in every week or so and bestow upon us said smiles in joyful abundance.  He even used to place the boxes exactly where we asked for them…..This is hugely rare, I can assure you-they would normally get dumped in the doorway creating a HealthAndSafetyNightmare! (Quel Horreur)  We even knew his name, which again is a big thing in the delivery man game, as it means that they’ve managed not to piss off the shop owners enough to have polite chats and receive a christmas card every, er, well…Christmas!

So yes, we loved Dave muchly. (Names have been changed just in case he ever randomly and entirely manages to side-step all known laws of probability and read this post….I wouldn’t want him to be embarrassed if he found himself having to deliver anything to me again!)

What was even more spiffing is that I got to keep Dave when I started working from home!  He would knock on my door at silly-o-clock (early for me…I’d rather start at 10am and go on to 6pm.  I had to clarify this as all of The Friends would be in uproar if they thought I was telling you all that I was up and working by 7.30!)

Anyway, he’d knock on my door at 7.45 and I’d clumsily stumble down the stairs in random mismatched pjs and ‘bed head’ so fierce any innocent passer-by would think I’d just been tasered.  I’d then proceed to mumble through the usual greetings: ‘Hi, how are you?’  Fine thanks, you?’ (By the way, this might just be the most pointless thing to ever utter out loud….No one listens, and if you ever stray from the accepted script with something like  ’Actually I’m a bit ropey and my bunion is throbbing like a mo fo’  then the other person looks as though they’ve just been slapped in the face with a stinky haddock, and proceed to scurry off in the other direction whilst trying not to catch anything!)

I digress.  Dave.  (Bless him!)  Anyway, I felt sorry for Dave having to be consistently subjected to my only-just-awake gorgeousness all the time, so I began anticipating which days he would deliver me my sparkly goodies.  Cue me bounding down the stairs in full regalia having gone to bed early at what The Parent calls  ‘A Reasonable Time’ the night before!

I even managed to make sure I didn’t have last night’s smudged mascara doing warpaint impressions, and spent the last five minutes before he rang the door bell chattering to myself so I could avoid that ‘I haven’t spoken today yet’ lurchy throat groan that always managed to rear its ugly head in the most inopportune of moments!

So Dave’s one of the extremely rare good ones.  He has, in the last few months stopped delivering stuff to me, and I miss him!  Yes, I know it is very silly of me to get attached to a man I barely know, but he cheered up my day with his alluring grubbiness and cheeky smile!

And so to the other sort.  Of which I have had the dubious pleasure of experiencing this very week.  This grouchy monosyllabic fiend can be found worldwide, and grows even when you don’t leave him in direct sunlight.  He is a weed and impossible to work with.  And as that’s probably one gardening metaphor too many I’ll stop there.

I ask you to picture the scene:  It’s tipping it down.  I’ve just got back home from a jewellery party and I do my usual trick of trampling dribbly footprints all over the post.  When I’ve picked it up and discarded all of the rubbish that gets shoved through my door, I come to a ‘Sorry I’ve missed you’ parcel card:

All this pathetic excuse for a human being could be bothered to write was ‘By gate’.  I then proceed to grumble about in the rain checking ‘by the gate’ for a parcel.  Nothing.  Nada.  By this point I’m getting soggy hair and the flip flops I’d stupidly shoved on whilst still wearing socks (I know, it’s a hot look!) were doing wonderful yet cold impressions of surf boards in high tide waves.  (I’m not even exaggerating-it was that day this week when the heavens opened and we all wished we had Steve Carell playing Evan Almighty as our benevolent, ark-building uncle)

Anyway, to cut a long story not very much shorter, the stupid oaf had flung, yes FLUNG my parcel OVER the gate and into my back garden where it landed with an unceremonious thud on some paving slabs.  In the rain.

To make matters worse, it was a glass photo frame I’d ordered with one of my birthday vouchers.  Yey, glass!  The substance that positively yearns to be manhandled and used as a basketball in a fence-post slam dunk.

To quote The Grandparent:  We are NOT amused!

Cue a strongly worded email that will no doubt never be answered and a tense phone call to replace the would-be gorgeous sparkly frame….

After all, I need it to go on my ‘feature wall’ (Lawrence Lewellyn-Bowen eat your heart out!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I don’t have a bunion, in case you were wondering!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head

TeaBiscuit. Coming Soon To A Theatre Near You!

I had an argument with a biscuit today.

I got stroppy with this particular biscuit because it had tricked me into buying and eating it.  I find it’s never good to realise you’ve been duped, especially when the item that’s done the duping is inanimate, therefore making it an essentially blameless biscuit.

Why did I feel tricked?  Because the picture on the packet charmed me into thinking it was a lovely crunchy cream filled type job, yet when I bit into this dastardly imposter it turned out to be a disappointing oaty thing with overtones of coffee.  Yuck!  I’m not much of a fan of coffee, which is rather a shame seeing as my brother insists on filling the kitchen with the extremely strong aroma without fail every morning.

I’ve often been told that when I grow up, I’ll learn to like both tea and coffee.  Well, I wonder what sort of age these people consider ‘grown up’ to be?  Whatever the magic number is, I’m not there yet!

My colleagues are all big tea fans.  I am amazed on a daily basis the amount of tea that gets consumed by an average of just 4 people a day, almost as if we could do with employing a tea minion full-time.

Seeing as I don’t partake in this particular part of the working day, I wonder if I could get the tea minion to perform other tasks?  Making my sandwiches?  Cleaning out the fridge?  Finding the car key I lost 2 years ago by trying to hide it from any potential thieves whilst I went on holiday?  To this day, I still can’t remember where it is hidden in my house.  Effective hiding place, eh?!!

There’s also an hourly performance of mini arguments as to who’s turn it is, coupled with ‘well so and so’s not produced a cup since Tuesday, I’m gasping!’
It’s TEA, people!  I’m at a loss to understand this ritual:  Is there a whole set of rules that govern tea making and the amount of times one must make it in 24 hours?  Is there a secret tea policeman that comes running up if you fall short of your daily quota?  What about tea punishments?  Being made to drink some obscure flavour whilst de-scaling the kettle?

Then there’s dunking.  Now even the useless imposter biscuit doesn’t deserve to have itself dipped head-first into a vat of muddy water.  The poor thing disintegrates faster than you can say ‘Tea is Vile’, and all you’re left with is the sorry, soggy remains stuck to the bottom of the mug, just covered by the puddle of cold tea that everyone who drinks the stuff seems incapable of finishing off.

I’ve never understood leaving the last gulp.  Surely it’s just the same temperature as the penultimate gulp, so it can’t be that it’s too cold to drink?  Leaving that endy bit of tea is like me leaving the endy bit of my kit kat…It’s unnecessary and shouldn’t ever happen!

I was too polite to decline a cup of tea once.

I had ended up on a totally random mission to rescue my Gran from a neighbouring village.  She’d phoned me up prattling on about how she’d gone round to visit her friend who wasn’t answering.  Cutting a long story short here (Because she’s not your Gran and you have other things to do today) It turns out the lady was an expert at being extremely deaf, and had simply not registered my dear Grandparent ringing that bell for all she was worth.

This rather pertinent piece of information did not make itself known to me until I arrived at the house in the middle of nowhere after having raced over expecting the worst:  The old lady could have got stuck on the stair lift, or locked herself out of the back door, or even fallen ill.  Nope, she’d simply not heard the door.  Great!!

So there I was, thinking about skulking back to my car and making a quick getaway, when my Gran grabs my arm in a vice-like grip and utters the disastrous words ‘Come in for a while then you can take me home in a bit, save me going back on the bus’

Along with being called three separate names in the space of 5 minutes, none of which were right (I suppose she should get points for them being close, she was really, really deaf!) I got poured a cup of tea.  Not asked if I wanted one, just handed a dainty yet dated cup and saucer and expected to drink from it.

Worst Drink Ever!

Bleurgggh, I have no idea how I managed to get through the rest of the time there. You know when you’re eating or drinking something and it’s still in your mouth.  You have that horrible pause when you know it tastes disgusting, but swallowing it will be even worse, so you end up prolonging the swallow until it can’t possibly be any more gross, then giving in with a grimace.  That was me the whole way down the tasteless cup of yucky tea!  In fact, the old lady started to look a little scared…I believe she thinks I was grimacing and pulling faces at her, rather than her rubbish taste in beverages.

So in my opinion, I will never be old enough to like the drink that 93% of the world drinks.  (This is another of my made up percentages, added here to aid visualisation – a tool to show the ludicrous popularity of Tea)  I will carry on trying to avoid getting handed another cup by innocent-looking old ladies egged on by my unruly Grandmother.

I will also continue to fight for the helpless biscuit’s right to be eaten without being drenched.  How can that improve the taste of the biscuit?  I don’t understand!!

All these things and more become my daily causes.  I may even make t-shirts:

‘Save the Biscuit from a Dunk Worse than Death! and

‘Tea is just Water, but Mouldy’

Stuff like that.  Keep an eye out in your local retailers for those bad boys!  They’ll sell like hotcakes!  (Mmmm, Cake!)

Love,

Fatty Blob Head