When you order pizza.... P4

[Racket_Man]

PLEASE PLEASE know your address before even thinking about picking up the phone.

I did not take this call but got the privilage of delivering it

Had a new customer call for delivery last night. The person taking the order, another driver, gets his information. caller says his address is 835 XY St.

Driver notes to the customer that 835 XY St. is not a valid address in our area (it would be in the middle of a park if it were valid). the customer says his address IS IN FACT 835 XY St and he is one block SOUTH (important later) of Z St (which is smack in the middle of our area). even the computer address database will not take 835 XY St. as a valid address.

OK maybe he is on XY AVE. (which is a short 2 block street east of XY St.). Nope address range only goes 300 - 600.

Well maybe he is on the even side of the street, but NO HE IS AT 835 XY St.

OK we just put in a fake address and put this supposed "valid address" in another field and make sure we have a valid phpone number.

I get the delivery and head off in the direction of the 800 block of XY St. well it turns out we were right and there is NO 835 XY St. I call him from my cell and ask for an address confirmation. HE TELLS me 835 XY St. I then tell him that is not a vliad address and ask what is the nearest/closest intersection to him. he tells he is near XY St. and A St. ONE FREAKING one block NORTH of Z St. and OH BY THE WAY his address is 535 XY St. (I guess he had to go outside and look).

I get to the RIGHT address and he hands me exact change and says in a sickly sweet voice "Have a great night"

great 2 blocks away the dumbass does not know his own address and I get straight stiffed

[Anakah]

I would have felt like an ASS and given a huge tip for the sheer embarassment. That jerk! How hard is it to know your OWN address!?

[bainsidhe]

If you knew ahead of time that the address was invalid, I'm surprised you tempted fate with pizza, gas and your time. Should have just told him NO, you don't deliver to that address- he'd have to come for carry-out.

[LillFilly]

It sound like he was messing with you on purpose.

Can you blacklist him?

[BaristaTrav]

If I had a buck for every time I:

a) Got sent on a wild-goose chase to an address that didn't exist

or

b) Got sent to an address where the people who ordered decided "nahh.. let's just go out to dinner" and neglected to call us to cancel their order..

I'd have probably made more than I did in tips.

[HYHYBT]

I don't know how the address verification systems pizza places use works, but from what I've seen from the other side, it's not trustworthy. At least three perfectly valid addresses I've tried to have delivered to don't show up correctly.

Mom's house, you can order through Papa John's web site, but when they finally found the house they asked her to order by phone and offered a couple dollars' discount to do so, because the computer messes up the directions for any address in her neighborhood. Or something like that.

The last McDonald's I worked in, none of the chains' web sites would accept the address as valid at all. Pizza Hut's auto-"corrected" DRIVE to HWY, thereby sending our order to the wrong PH location and then their driver to what, best I can tell, is a vacant lot. And of course, if the site doesn't recognize your address, you can't use it to find out which location you're supposed to call in your order to either. Once I did find that out, they also couldn't take our address, but of course the advantage of speaking with a live, local person is that they understand "it's the McDonald's across the street from the mall."

And at the store I was working in at the end of 2003, I called all the nearby PH's, with each one telling me I was in the next's delivery area.

[EricKei]

PLEASE PLEASE know your address before even thinking about picking up the phone.

I always HATED this when I worked for PJ's

It sound like he was messing with you on purpose.

Agreed. He was probably trying to get a free meal out of you guys "because your driver couldn't find a simple address"

b) Got sent to an address where the people who ordered decided "nahh.. let's just go out to dinner" and neglected to call us to cancel their order..

Another pizza pet peeve, here.

The worst case was a house in a wealthy area, literally at the farthest-away corner of our delivery area. It's hard to get to even once you're in their little zone -- it requires either going ten blocks north and coming back down, or passing them up and making a U-turn on a 4-lanes-each-way highway without a light... (best case scenario: 20 minutes to get there)...They called during prime time, requiring me to get stuck in rush hour traffic to get there, so we quoted them "45-60 minutes" rather than the usual 35-40. Nothing else was going out that way, so I took only their order. I managed to get there in exactly 45 minutes, only to see them all dressed in formal wear and piling into an expensive car. The wife throws a fit, claims that we quoted them "no more then 35 minutes" (BS, I took that call), then she THREW the pizzas on her front table and screamed that "They're WASTED now!", gave me exact change, and sped off to the opera or wherever.

Even if we had gotten it there at the "expected" 35 minutes delivery time (quoting under 30 is illegal here), they would then have had ten minutes to polish off four large pizzas -- while wearing tuxedos and fancy dresses. Talk about your poor planning >_>

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Even better is when people call to change their orders after half an hour -- meaning, it's already in the delivery driver's car -- and then acting surprised when we tell them that we can't then change 90% of their order. I'd be TICKED if I ordered at 7 and it hadn't even been made when I called back at 7:30...

[Stryker One]

DIY

There's a reason I pick up my pizza.

[Pagan]

And that's the reason I make my own pizza. Less of a headache for everyone involved!

[bsaana]

I had a FedEX driver stop to deliver something to someone that had listed MY address as theirs. He called them from my driveway and the other person said that is my address. She had to go out and LOOK AT THE HOUSE NUMBERS!!! This is not a large town. 1500 people at the most. People are just idiots.

[Hyena Dandy]

Hmm... I agree.

Although there was that one time I ordered Chinese and didn't give them my address...

I was wondering why it took them so long.