Siding With Myself

Well, after all my box woes on Friday and Saturday, I held on to the security that a delivery truck would arrive bright and early on Monday morning and unload boxes in both sizes and in overwhelming quantity. And believe it or not, that offered some extraordinary peace of mind on Sunday night when I started to review the week ahead. As Team PJP greeted each other early Monday morning, we all said “welp, we finally get boxes today”…so clearly, I wasn’t the only one thinking about it over the weekend.

We usually expect this truck around 8 am, so by 10 am with no arrival, I was more than concerned about the whereabouts of our boxes (and well, the welfare of the driver too). So I called the company to check and the lady says “oh, let me check” and then:

(Warning: Please sit down for this next part.)

“THE DRIVER DIDN’T SHOW UP FOR WORK TODAY, SO YOU AREN’T GETTING YOUR DELIVERY. NONE OF THE 30 STOPS ON HIS ROUTE ARE GETTING THEIR DELIVERIES.”

I’m not even kidding. Though, I wish I were. So we did the most on-brand thing we could do - Jeanne tore out of PJP Nifong and drove to Independence, into the underground cave where the company is located, and loaded up her car with boxes. And then drove back to PJP Nifong and we boxed everything.

Which begs the question though…what did the other 29 other companies do? Are we the only ones that stock to a zero margin of error quantity? Was anyone else salty? Will anyone give that driver some serious side eye next week? (Though, in that guy’s defense, he deserves a day off or a sick day when needed…so I guess really the company needs more staff. And I’m oddly comforted by that because we have days where PJP is a disaster, but we never cancel pie. Even if it were just Jeanne and I, there would be something. Honestly, if we owned a box and bag company and there wasn’t a delivery driver, you better bet Jeanne or I would just load our cars ourselves and drive to the stops.)

The company says delivery drivers are too hard to find and so there isn’t much they can do about the problem. (And no, we didn’t get a discount for driving four hours roundtrip to pick up the boxes.) I have mixed feelings about that statement…primarily because I think it is sort of a lame excuse, but I also admire the cavalier attitude they have about it. If I shorted 30 people, I would need a Xanax and a Red Bull to fuel me through all the driving it took to make the situation remedied. And then I would obsess about it for at least the next five to seven years. I have no idea which is really the best way to be as a business owner, but I’m sorta siding with myself on this one.