A man asked me to ask a taco truck to put extra sauce on his fish taco last night. I told him I would ask. He told me he had probably done this twenty times. He ended a sentence with “my friend.” I rejected his order and made another driver pick it up.
The issue, between me and—let’s call him Bill—was that Bill had a lot of requests pertaining to his order from a taco truck down south and east of town. Well, that wasn’t the issue, but without that, there wouldn’t have been an issue. Some of Bill’s requests, I was pretty confident I could handle—he wanted “lots of assorted salsas,” for example. I can ask for those. Bit of an inconvenience, but I can ask for those. But when he asked for the extra sauce on the fish taco, and I explained that I couldn’t promise anything because the order should be made by the time I arrived to pick it up, he was not content with me asking. He wanted a guarantee. He wanted that extra sauce. And to demonstrate this, he sent me multiple texts while I pulled out of the apartment complex after delivering a six-pack of White Claw to a woman packing up her home before she moved the next day (which I guess was today—if you’re reading this, let’s call you Kate, I hope the move is going well, and I am grateful for the tip). So I clicked “cancel,” and then, when asked why, clicked “other.” And then I canceled the other order I was supposed to pick up from the truck, too, because Bill reminded me that they might take a while, and I was in a bit of a hurry.
I think it was the “my friend” that got me. I was already questioning picking up the orders, since that truck has taken a long time for me before (maybe because Bill’s driver was making the guys at the window go back and remake Bill’s order), but “my friend” was when I knew Bill was not your average delivery customer. Your average delivery customer is cool with it when you tell them Taco Bell is out of the flavor of whatever frozen drink Taco Bell’s slinging these days and that they just gave you the most popular one. Your average delivery customer knows it isn’t your fault if the restaurant forgot the fries. But not people who call you, “my friend.” Those people live their life in a way that implies they’re expecting a Godfather IV audition to break out at any moment. Those people are not your average delivery customer.
But as I sit back here this afternoon, thinking on what transpired, I realize something.
Bill definitely does not get extra sauce on his taco at that place.
Because it would have been real simple for me if I’d just sent a thumbs up in response to him, told him they had extra sauce, and let him live his blissful life fantasizing about leaving horse heads in people’s beds (mine now, probably). I’d imagine this is what the other twenty drivers did. If not, they sacrificed a good chunk of money getting Bill’s taco saucy enough.
Anyway, I made someone else pick up Bill’s order, which meant he had to ask another driver to get his taco sauced (I like to think Bill had to go through about eight drivers, getting progressively angrier until he was typing “MY FRIEND” in all caps and ending every text with a period and his mediumly-sauced taco was sitting in the truck getting cold), and I got a pair of orders at a knockoff Olive Garden on the highway, and the customer for one of them—let’s call him Cliff—either suffered an app glitch or forgot to enter his apartment number, but either way he didn’t answer my one text and three calls and one voicemail in the mandated eight minutes, so I got a free crappy steak that I didn’t enjoy and didn’t need (had eaten supper already) but was free, and was thereby kind of a success even if it cost me Cliff’s four-dollar tip.
Let that be a lesson to the rest of you.
