CURBSIDE ETIQUETTE

Through the Eyes of a Delivery Goddess



Below you will find links to dates when new entries are added. The stories will not necessarily be in chronological order, but rather as I remember them. I am dating them so that you can skip to new ones you haven't read since the last time you visited, and so that you are more easily able to find something you found humorous to share with others.
The Book's Cover


I'm sure you've heard the clichè, "Don't judge a book by its cover..."

As most of you know, Bob and I deliver newspapers over night. About two years ago, other newspaper companies approached the Pittsburgh Post Gazette about contracing its existing network of carriers to also deliver their products, saving them money, and helping to prop up a struggling Post Gazette. We have up to seven different newspapers inside our tiny mobile offices, and each seems to have its own color of plastic bag for delivery. The bags are printed with the name of each particular newspaper for advertising purposes, so you can understand, from the company's viewpoint, why they would not want their paper in someone else's bag. Now, from a carrier's shallow-pocket point of view, we pay for the bags as they are tools of our trade, just like our vehicles. As an "FYI". plastic is petroleum based, so every time the cost of a barrel of oil goes up, the cost of our bags goes up along with the cost of our gasoline. Most paper recipients are flexible, if they receive two different newspapers, and we stuff them both (or even three or four and yes, there are some genuine news junkies left that still read a physical paper in the morning with coffee), into one bag, there are very few whistle blowers.

A few Sundays ago, I ran out of red bags about a dozen customers from the end of the route. You have heard me speak of Crybaby Condos- and of course, that's where I ran out of red bags. I gave those residents WAY too much credit; the first three people that I put their "red" paper in a "green" bag yelled at me that I'd given them the wrong newspaper. I stopped and yelled back, "I ran out of red bags, look inside, it's the correct paper." I would like to think that, if I were the customer, I'd look inside before I started assuming I had the wrong paper... but who knows? I might be just as programmed as those folks and not look first, either.

The next day, I was relating my experience to another carrier. She rolled her eyes in disbelief, pretty much the same as I did, assuming that she too, would be patient enough to open the bag before assuming she'd received the wrong paper. Only three days later, she had a similar experience, where she mistakenly put a red-bagged paper in a green bag. The next day, my friend was met by the lady-customer, holding a red bag, scolding that her "paper belongs in a RED bag, not a green one."

The moral of this story? You can't judge a book by it's cover, and you can't tell the news by it's color.