Zen and the Art of Pizza Delivery

My dad's a cop. He's been with the police force for 19 years or so now, but he got a late start in his police career, not going through the Academy until he was 42. But the thing of it is, my dad was a cop before he was a cop, if you know what I mean. He's always been the authoritarian, good with keeping tabs on things, willing to bust his ass for what he thought was right. So when he actually became a cop, it was like "oh yeah, this fits."

So, for better or worse, it's save to say that I've pretty much always been a pizza delivery guy.

It's easy to see how people could look at that statement and pull a negative connotation from it, or assume that I'm being self deprecating. After all, you think of pizza guys, you think of stoned slackers who want to work as little as possible and spend their free time riding their fixies and listening to Zepplin in their parents basement. I'm not going to say that any of that is false for a lot of drivers.

But I think that--whether they realize it or not--many drivers have a far more zen-like approach to life than the average person. We all do the job for the tips and the ability to have a decent amount of walking around cash in our pockets, but no one ever became a pizza driver under the auspices of becoming rich from it. And most of us are fine with that. Myself, for example: I only deliver three to four days a week, averaging right around 20-25 hours. My paychecks are juuuuuust enough to pay my rent and bills, and the tip money keeps me in food and DVD's. It's not very Rand-ian of me, but it certainly fits the "pursuit of happiness" portion of the American Dream.

Another thing that attracts many of us to the job, is the impermanence of the whole thing. I'm personal friends with the owners of my shop. I first started working for them when I was 18 and they had one store in town. Now I'm 34 and they've expanded to 11 locations in two states. I haven't worked for them the entire time, but rather I've come and gone pretty much as I've pleased. If I decide tomorrow that I've got to get out of dodge for a while, I can say the word and walk away from the job without causing any real disruption for them. And, when I finally arrived at my chosen destination, there's a pretty solid chance that I could get a job the same day delivering pizza somewhere. As I mentioned in my first post, there's not a huge screening process for drivers at most places; there are usually not a lot of questions asked beyond "do you have a car?" "can you find your way around?" and "can you keep your pants on for six consecutive hours?" As a general rule, as long as you can show up when asked, get food from one place to another without it going cold, and don't steal your bank at the end of the day, you can deliver pizzas whenever and wherever you want. It opens up a lot of options for a person who's looking for a more languid approach to life. Which is why it tends to attract stoned slackers. That and the pizza, of course.

I guess what I like most about all of the above, or the thing that most defines the majority of the drivers I know is that we don't tend to define ourselves by our jobs (says the guy with a pizza blog). I happen to deliver pizzas to pay my bills at the moment. I didn't always, and I might choose to stop tomorrow. But in the meantime, the method by which I get my cash isn't a reflection of who I am or what I want out of life; it's a means to end. Granted, not being defined by my job also means I'm not particularly fulfilled by it, either. But I've got other things to do that. My friends. My kittens. A ton of old generation video games. I don't come home at night worrying about the next day or sweating something that happened at work. I come home at night with breadsticks. And for now, that's a pretty sweet way to go.