Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess |
|
|
Most mornings, the Trib carrier whose route runs overtop of my Post Gazette route and I are on the phone talking about eBay and customers and weather. Sometimes, we end up in the same housing plan at the same time. At night, you can't always tell who is coming toward you, just by the headlights, and I'm certain, that from above, we would look like we were dancing. We both start out on the wrong side of the road, but when you see headlights coming toward you, your reaction is to move to the correct side of the road. If it's another carrier, the two of you end up back and forth, left and right, until one of you comes to a complete stop and shuts off the headlights to signal the other to pass on by. If it happens to be Robin and I, we laugh on the phone, "Get out of my way" and so on. We've often remarked how funny it would look from an airplane to see us running through the houses at night. If you've been reading along, you might remember the patio homes or condo plans I've mentioned in previous installments. Crybaby Condos. If you look at one of those layouts from an arial view, you would see the street starting at one end, and making a huge loop, with small driveways leading off toward each side, and large flat homes between them. Let's say that you start on the main road and make the first right into the first driveway. There are four condos that adjoin in the center, two face the first driveway, but you'd have to back out and turn down the next one to see the next two or the two on the "back". From the second driveway, you'd see the front two of the next quad on your left and the rear two of the first quad on your right. Are you with me? Someday, I might go back and add pictures, but for now, I hope that explains what I'm talking about just a little bit. Since these folks either need or want their papers on their porches, we have to pull into a driveway, toss up to four papers, then back out of the driveway and move on to the next. Robin and I have often laughed about the two of us pulling in, then backing out, moving to the next and pulling in, then backing out, and how it all might look from the air with two of us in the plan at the same time. At least WE thought it would look funny. One night, I was already at the inside end of a driveway, I could see the NY Times driver heading toward the bottom of the driveway from the street. I expected him to wait for me to back out, but instead, he drove through the yard to get around me while I was backing out. That's a REALLY BIG NO-NO when it comes to bending over even one blade of grass in a place like that. The reason people live in condominiums, is that you pay a monthly fee for someone else to take care of the exterior and grounds of your home, (an especially valuable service in the winter months). The Post Gazette received all kinds of flack over the set of tire tracks in the yard - the residents just ASSUMED it was me. I'm not sure what the NYTimes guy was thinking that night, but it must not have been the amount of complaints we'd get from residents when they noticed a path of bent over grass in their yards. |