Delivery story 291 Mike writes: This was one of my most frustrating deliveries! I can see the fun in it now, but it sure was annoying, frustrating, and above all else amazingly stupid at the time. I was out on a one-delivery trip. It was a slow night. A young girl with a party in the background had ordered a bunch of pizzas so I was prepared to meet some drunk people. Suddenly on the street, the house numbers were not visible anymore. Fortunately, we have a pattern so the address numbers go up by two as you pass. If one house is 34, the next will be 36 with 35 on the other side. I drove a bit back and found a house with a visible number and started to drive up, counting houses. Then I stopped at the house that should be the right one. I rang the doorbell and an old man answered. There was no noise coming from the house. I hurried to apologize for disturbing him and told him I was looking for house number X. The old man was about 80 years old. He quickly said, "This is X!" I became annoyed, not at him, but at the idea the order might be a drunk party prank. I had to be sure, so I asked him, "You are saying this is house number X?" and he nodded yes. This was nearly a ten minute drive from the store. If the customer just left a wrong house number by mistake, it would take 20 minutes to drive back, call the person to get the right address and then redeliver to the right place. But the old man was smiling and seemed kind, so I figured no harm in asking and asked him if I could come in and borrow his telephone as there must had been a mistake in the order. The old man happily let me inside to call. He was a very pleasant old man and his wife offered me something to drink while I was dialing. Nice elderly couple. I called my boss and he started right on it and will call me back in a bit, so I sat down to talk a bit with this elderly couple and the wife pondered for a bit and then asked me, "Did you say you had to deliver pizzas to X?" I nodded as she was correct. "But this is not X. That is next door!" My eyes opened wide and her husband was like, "Oh, we don't live in X? What is our house number again?" I just stood there in amazement at this old man not knowing his own address. I called my boss, who luckily had not yet been able to find the number from the order and told him to never mind. I quickly wished the old couple a good evening and went to deliver the pizzas at the right house. The owner of the store almost didn't believe me when I told him what had happened once I came back. return to top