Covid-19. Yep it has impacted all of us. In my situation I adapted. I refused to access my unemployment. It should only be for emergencies. Viking Foods, is a food delivery service found only in Whatcom County and a small bit of Skagit County. The organisation has been around for eight years and they service 140 restaurants in the local area. I knew they needed people due to an ad I had heard on the radio. I emailed them and had to have an interview. This was rather strange, I hadn’t needed an interview for Uber or Lyft before. Turns out they interview all their future drivers to make sure they’re not creepy or an ass hole. I had the interview on a Saturday afternoon. I rocked up to a small green building, that looked like a house. It smelled like yandi aka marijuana and out the front saw two cars. I walked in and a saw a young fella dispatching drivers and an older bloke who had grey short hair, with thick black framed glasses. “You must be Paul, come right this way” he said. I followed him into a small office with no windows, just wall to wall action figures, some never taken out of their packages. This middle aged man was very proud of his collection. It was definitely a talking point, he had anything from the Marvel universe, to the DC world and a whole wall dedicated to Spawn. Batman, GI Joe, Spider Man, Super Man, and even Thor. He asked me about my experience with Uber Eats and how I liked it. “It’s pretty ordinary, but I gotta make money somehow” I replied. The Viking concept in the area is due to the University. Their mascot is a viking and they have a rugby team they are very proud of, no American Football team though. Anyway the interview led to the bloke hiring and could tell I wasn’t a creepo. Apparently back in the day they started screening their drivers more due an incident. Yep some ass hole decided to assault one the customers. Not sure why? Devo as I like to call him, did not give me the gory details. Similar to Uber you get paid for the order when you accept the ping and then go the restaurant and pick up the food and then once picked up you click a button which takes you to the address of the customer. My first week Vikinging, I decided to stay north and just leave the house when I got a ping for food. This whole week was to get into a rhythm of delivering food.
Monday
Moody monday’s the day after sleepy sunday’s. I went down south to pickup a hot bag (which was a $25 deposit you get back) and many boxes of soft drink. A total of 36 cans of Mountain Dew, 24 cans of Dr. Pepper, 24 cans of Coca Cola, 24 Cans of Sprite, and 24 cans of Diet coke. Since I was to service Blaine and Ferndale I had to have soft drink in my car for any of the orders. Not all restaurants had drinks to go. Viking would charge $1.50 a can if the customer needed a bevo. I made my way north and they sent me to Ferndale to pickup burgers for the Alcoa refinery, an aluminium refinery. The customer had strict instructions to go to the second gate at the facility. I first picked up the burgers and went on my merry way to the refinery. First gate I saw was a boom gate that was open and then I observed a sign that says main gate. I parked, got out of the car and went to the office. “Got an order for Jo!” I said. “Sorry who are you?” The security guard said. “Paul from Viking foods, is there a Jo here? Is this the second gate?” The man stared at me and replied “Second gate? Maybe he means the Totem entrance?” I stared and queried “Totem entrance?” “Go back out make a right and follow the road that veers to the left. You’ll see a big Lummi Eagle on one of the structures there”. “Cheers mate!” I did what he said and eventually I just rang the customer. “Where are you?” He asked where I was and then told me how to get to him. As I rocked up he apologised for the inconvenience of how to get there. He said there’s a whole day of figuring out where to go around the facility and 9 times out of 10 people still get lost and have no idea who anyone is. I laughed and drove off. I was sent to Blaine to pick up various food from Thai, to Chinese, to Mexican to eventually burgers. I rocked up to Bob’s Burgers and sat down to wait for an order. An elderly lady walked in with a mask on and asked me “Are you delivering food?” “Yes ma’am, just started working for Viking today in fact”. “Thank you for your service”. I stared and looked at her and humoured her “You’re welcome ma’am”. Ha me? What am I in the military? Delivering food to random people in the middle of a pandemic? I didn’t really thing of it. Then I thought you know what? I’ll take that. That day I had made over $100. Not bad, but I wanted more obviously.
Tuesday
The following day I thought about how lonely delivering food can be. Apart from picking up the food, it’s cvery rare to come into contact with people. Doing Lyft and Uber I was able to have interesting and somewhat funny conversations with people. The tuesday took me to again the local restaurants in Blaine and Ferndale I was possibly the northern most delivery driver on the western seaboard. I would walk into Paso Del Norte and they would tell me how useful I would be come the weekends. One customer had to wait 2 hrs for their food and put in a complaint. Gee whiz! I’d probably complain too. People were tipping generously throughout my shift. Now every order I would get $3.99 and then another $1 after an order was over 4.5 miles. Then all tips paid to me would go to my pocket. There wasn’t too much going on this tuesday except pick-up and dropping off of food. I could give you the reader a tally of every single restaurant, but there’s really no point. All I will say is that it was a mixture of Chada Thai, Bob’s Burgers and Brews, Teriyaki Cafe, Paso Del Norte, and Grants Burgers.
Wednesday
Now you only have to read what I said at the end of the previous day to get the gist of how boring delivering food can be. You do have to fight the urge to eat the food that is sitting next to you. The delicious smells yelling at your nose, saying “EAT ME!” You got to fight the temptation and just give that food away. Now this day I was exceptionally hungry. I had my lunch, but was thinking it wasn’t enough. I went to pick up two orders from Paso del Norte. I went to drop off the first one. I delivered the wrong meal to the wrong house. Yikes! I had to turn around and deliver the correct one. Dispatch told me that order had to be redone. Especially with Covid-19 an issue and the fact it was a burrito meant that it was probably going to be cold by the time I deliver it to the next house. I dropped off the right bag and the lady gave it back to me. I asked dispatch, “what am I going to with this meal now?” “Throw it out”. Well crap! I’m not going to put this food to waste. I took it home after picking up and dropping the second burrito and I bloody ate it didn’t I? It was fantastic. I could feel my stomach gaining extra mass, bite after bite. Delicious!
Thursday
My next day at Viking had me again delivering food in Blaine and Ferndale. I had to finish early that day because I thought I’d take advantage of a deal for donating plasma. The coupon said after five visits you get $600. In these crazy times I’ll do what I can for money. After a few drop off north, I went south. I was a little early so I decided to turn Uber and Lyft on. Ping! Wow already? I got a message from the passenger. “I’m blind as a bat!” I drove up as close to her as possible and yelled out “Are you Maree?” “Yes!” she exclaimed. She walked towards me with her stick. She had thick black sunglasses on. She really was blind. I tried to help her with my voice. “This way, yep you’re getting warmer, no left, watch out for the concrete, there’s a car there, okay back a bit yeah there’s the door.” “Thank you for that, I was born blind, but it can be challenging when there is shit in the way. I normally have a dog, but he’s getting a check up today”. She needed to go to the pharmacist and she told me there haven’t been too many uber or lyft drivers lately. Her phone was speech activated and was making all kinds of odd noises. Everything she would say was speech activated. She was in the back seat and then wanted me to go through the drive through pharmacy and then go back. She was doing a multi trip and it hadn’t been imputed yet. So she tried to add that into her phone. It was a struggle. I said “Look do you have any cash?” “Yes I do, give me $5 and that’ll be fine.” We spoke on the way there and she told me all about her voice crushes from television. News Presenters I had never heard of. She would have been in her 70s, but one voice I did know, was Mel Gibson. She fell in love with that voice in the 80s. She told her husband that if she came across that voice that would be the end of her marriage. This lady was hilarious. She didn’t hold back. We picked up her script and I tried to ask her where her house was and she said “Just drop me off at the office where you picked me up from and I’ll find my way back”. “How?!” I exclaimed “Don’t worry I’ve lived here long enough to find my way back” she said. I honestly didn’t feel confident with doing that, but she insisted. She knew I had a plasma donation appointment to go to. That was technically my 130th day of ride sharing.
I got to the Biolife building where they do the plasma donations. They took my temperature to see that I didn’t have the Covid. Sure enough I was fine. They wanted all my details. Then they took blood pressure. People were all socially distant from each other. The nurses had full on face shields with surgical masks underneath. Gloves smothered everyone’s hands except for the patients. They call me around to the side and pricked my finger. Blood started to ooze out of my finger. I started to hear my heart beating in my ears. Thundering. I went white. I started to feel dizzy. I wasn’t mentally prepared for the finger prick but they wanted to see my Rh blood group. I hate blood tests and I have only had one bad reaction to one and that was in high school. I got up too quickly and almost fainted. I stopped myself. Anyway the finger prick made me feel woozy. I told the nurse. They sat me down on a little bed facing a bloke who was having his blood sucked dry right in front of me. He was looking at his phone. They gave me some water. My heart was racing. It’s like it went into shock. Last time that happened to me was when my ex slammed a metal fence into my foot and bounced off the bone. She was trying to keep her dog from escaping after it lost control of it’s back legs out of nowhere. I went into shock. Side note tangent: that dog ended up with a wheel chair from America to help her get around. They used acupuncture and water therapy to get her legs working again. It bloody worked. They called this dachshund the miracle dog, no more wheel chair. Unfortunately, about a year later she was bitten by an eastern brown snake on a property in Inverell. It died. Rural properties in Australia can be extremely hazardous for your pets. Anyway where was I? Oh yes me being a baby. The nurses ended up giving more water, a juice and a weird kids treat called animal crackers. I wolfed them down and drank all the water. I sat for about half an hour. Then I said “I think I’m ready for my blood to be taken”. The nurse looked at me and said “No you’re not a good candidate for this, you will be sitting there for 45 minutes whilst blood is taken from you and then returned to your body cold. We don’t want you passing put with a needle in your arm”. Embarrassed and defeated I nodded my head. “Well at least I tried”. I’ll say this if anyone out there is not afraid of needles or doesn’t faint when they are pricked or doesn’t have an issue of fast running blood, please donate. My body was my own worst enemy in this situation. Oh boy! No saving lives or $600 for me.
Friday
It was the busiest day I had all week. Getting close to $200 that day. I worked again in the north and delivered from the same restaurants to a couple of the same houses. It wasn’t an interesting day, except for the money and that I knew I would get a weekend. Till next time week 2 Viking.
