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Where I live it’s still like this minus the map (they don’t need one)
and the reason they stopped delivering within 30 minutes was cause it led to reckless driving and many, many, many traffic accidents and losses of life.
And the pizza actually tasted better than it does today.
The science of embalming food hadn’t progressed as far at that point.
And you know what else kids? The food was actually good!
As one of those Gen-X land pirates, I really wonder what would happen if GPS suddenly disappeared? Like, when is the last time anyone has seen or used a paper map?
I also delivered pizza back in the days, and yeah - the big paper map was a thing, but after awhile, didn’t even need that
Oh man… I’m dyslexic so basically without GPS I’m constantly confused.
I worked for a weird IT company called
AllSafeJ/K AllCovered™ that really leaned into their homegrown dispatch software. And it was pretty impressive… but it relied on the GPS in our Dell laptops, which was not so hot inside a Ferriday cage, or frankly even sitting on top of a car, so I remember having a Thomas Guide, and several other paper maps that I would try desperately to use to find the next client location.It was almost never the same client twice so learning a route was basically impossible. I got shitcanned for bitching out my supervisor, who didn’t know he was my supervisor, because none of us knew who each other were. Good-fuck, social engineering would have been a piece of cake back then.
You can look into places where GPS is heavily jammed like Ukraine, Russia or the baltics. It’s not great, but people will adapt.
Childhood memories unlocked! They even made time for the best 4th grade field trip ever 🤤
We got to make our own tiny pizza 🍕
What was yours?
After the internet too.
I delivered pizzas for quite some time and we had a map on the wall laid out like a road map with grids.
Order came in, address matched to grid, find the address and go.
Our slower drivers would use gps or maps. The good ones just knew the area.
And if you couldn’t pay for the pizza, they’d have sex with you
I love the association that younger generations have with paper maps is pirates. Literally everyone used maps, they had racks of them at gas stations. And yet, now they’re legendary items that only exist with Xs that mark the location of treasure.
Also, I cannot explain my excitement the first time I cut a human out of the pizza ordering pipeline. With zero regard for the employment impact, all I could think about was never getting the wrong kind of pizza (or it it going to the wrong house and never showing up) again. No longer was there a risk of being misheard or someone else making a mistake entering the order info for your address or a half sausage and onion, half pepperoni jalapeño pizza. Everyone around me thought ordering your pizza through an internet website was the nerdiest thing. Most of them didn’t know it was an option and even after my explanation, they preferred to call, wait your turn on hold, repeat your house number, spell out your street name, give a cross street and explain which half of the pizza was your parents toppings and which half was the kids. People just couldn’t believe that you could type something into a computer at your house and then a pizza would show up, without the assurance of a person’s voice confirming they’d received your order and that they will cook exactly what you requested and bring it to you. Of course there was no feedback in those days. You didn’t get an ETA for when it would arrive, an update when your pizza was being cooked, or when the driver left the shop, let alone a GPS tracked map of the drivers location. Once you selected whether you were paying in cash (like a normal person) or paid in advance with a credit card (like some kind of fancy business person), you just waited. If your order didn’t show up after 45 mins, you pick up the house phone, find a coupon you saved with the pizza shop number, and manually press physical plastic buttons that moved and beeped, which was the style at the time.
I have three local places that still deliver using their own guy and I order exclusively from them. It limits my options, but fuck the delivery apps. Anywhere else, I either dine in or pick it up myself.
I do the same. If anyone uses those stupid apps, I consider them to be lazy bitches.
the land before the techbro company that adds very little value got rich by putting themselves in the middle, scamming clients and exploiting workers, while making them angry with each other.
“progress”
Imagine not being able to look things up on your phone the instant you think of them
You’d have a notebook with you to write it down for later.
But yeeeaahh…No bueno for getting it now.
I always enjoy staring at this exact framed photo any time I’m waiting at my local Domino’s. It really gives me that Saturday night pizza feeling.
“unskilled labor”
Not this again.
“Unskilled labor” means that you do not need special skills to apply for the job; you will be trained on the spot.
That would mean every management job is unskilled and CEOs should be paid minimum wage.
I can dig it.
you do not need special skills to apply for the job
That’s definitely the textbook economic definition.
But the colloquial definition is that you don’t need special skills to do the job. Employees are interchangeable outside some minimal qualifications (rudimentary intellect, marginal physicality, gender).
And therefore you should be able to fully staff your organization paying the lowest prevailing wage rate, so long as some number of unemployed people exist. Anyone can be fired and replaced at any time with near-zero friction.
So when I pay your mom for feet pics, she’s working and an unskilled labourer?
I don’t think the difference is the minimum education for entry.
I’d say the difference is how much of your paycheck is because of you specifically and how much is for just general labor.
So a physics researcher job is “skilled” because most of the pay is because the specific researcher knows about physics.
But a waiter job is “unskilled” since the skills needed to do the job are the skills needed for basically any job:
- Basic maths skills
- People skills
- Willingness to work
- Physical endurance
- Enthusiasm to work
- Memory
- Handling stressful situations
- Other relatively basic skills
Of those, only physical endurance and people skills are “exclusive” to being a waiter. There are some actual jobs that require no physical endurance. And some jobs don’t require as much people skills as being a waiter does. But the rest of them are general across basically every job.
Of course, "unskilled job"s do require skills, I just listed a bunch of them. But most of those skills, any other worker that does any other job would have. Therefore I count payment for those skills as payment for “general labor” and not “payment for you specifically”.
So all apprentices are unskilled labour?
I really liked being a pizza delivery driver pre-GPS. It did require some skill, but you learned quickly about how things work:
- Is it a complex of some sort (e.g., trailer park, apartment, condo)? Look for a unit map.
- Evens on one side of the street, odds on the other
- You learn all of those weird roads that have the same name in two disconnected parts of town
It was easily the best “shitty job” I’ve ever had.
That, and each driver would cover a specific area within the delivery range. It’s not like they would have to read a map that fast for an address in an area they didn’t already have practically memorized.
Thank you for your service 🫡
The thin bread line separates not only the hungry from the fed but the men from the boys too. It has a higher casualty rate than being a police officer.
In my city:
-
all the addresses are the same on all the parallel streets,
-
“East” and “West” are all separated by the same long North-South Boulevard,
-
even numbered express/highways will take you East/West, odd numbered North/South.
Lots of other stuff I’ve since forgotten, but I went from not knowing the city to knowing it by heart in a couple of months.
Now I do longer haul deliveries so I know areas far from where I live. I spend my time scoping out potential restaurants/areas for day trips or vacations.
-
Apartments and multi tenant buildings in my country have numbers in a pattern, 1001 bottom first floor first to the left, 1002 next…1101 next floor same etc etc
Finding the right apartment even without a name of the owner becomes a breeze.
Do you think the postal and delivery workers have learnt this? …nope…
Pizza delivery though? No issues at all
Pizza goes cold, packages (usually) not.
I remember buying my first mapsco and thinking: well shit, I literally can’t get lost now…
Same. I loved the independence of it. But it didn’t pay enough to cover the repair bills it generated.
