2/28/10

I cut my teeth in the restaurant business at Pizza Hut. I started as a delivery driver, then picked up some occasional hours as a shift manager. When my general manager decided to move on to another career, I leapfrogged a handful of more experienced people and took over as the new general manager. Fortune took me from there to progressively bigger venues during that career, but I have never, at any point in my life, seen a pizza delivery take more than two hours... until last night. My horizons have been expanded. Here's to you - Pizza Hut in Joplin.

Since I hadn't managed to sleep much before I got hungry, and then I sat waiting all night for my dinner to arrive, I chose to hit the road as soon as my legally mandated break was over. With my delivery in Michigan scheduled for 7am on Monday, I was hoping to cover at least half the trip before I needed to go to bed and get some rest. As it turned out, I managed to pull off an almost full day of driving with a nice nap in Illinois along the way. There wasn't much traffic and the weather was good, so the drive was nice and easy. My morning nap was long enough to bring the 14 hour rule into play, so I couldn't get eleven hours of driving in, but ten hours is still pretty solid.

As luck would have it, I got off the road in time to catch the gold medal hockey game. Also as luck would have it, I wound up in an area with lousy internet access and no pubs or restaurants with televisions around. Setting aside the terribly slow data speed here, my Sprint internet card won't even hold a consistent connection. I found the radio broadcast on AM 720 (WGN out of Chicago) but the static was unbearable. After some tinkering, I got hooked to the internet through my cell phone and found an internet stream of that same radio broadcast. Not an ideal setup by any means, but it worked well enough. Since my AT&T data connection, much like the Sprint connection, wasn't fast enough to support a video stream, this was the best that I could do.

Sounds like it would have been a fun game to watch. Congrats, hosers.

From Warren, Indiana, where I'm spending the night, I'll have to cover around a hundred miles in the morning. I'm due at the consignee (the world's favorite symbol of capitalist greed) by 7am. I'll get in trouble if I'm too early, but sometimes there is a line of trucks waiting to get checked in. So I can't roll in right at 7am either. My best bet will be to leave here around 4:30am and see how the traffic is moving through Fort Wayne. There's a rest area in Michigan where I can take a little break if I'm going to get to Coldwater before 6:30am. If there are any delays or traffic issues, I'll have enough of a buffer that I still should be able to get through the check-in by 6:45am or so.

4:30am, eh? Alarm Clock -1, Godfather - 0. I lose, mofos.