There Will Be Microplastics
An ode to my recent summertime scourge: those hefty cases of bottled water.
DC summer draws close. There have already been multiple 90-degree days this spring and Memorial Day Weekend has yet to arrive. The crush of humidity is still building, so the 90-degree days of July will be more stifling than the ones already visited upon us.
Last summer, I found a new nemesis, and its name is water, bottled water. In April of 2023, I wrote a post about my early experiences delivering with DoorDash, and I probably should have held out a couple more months because dealing with all the cases of bottled water during the summer months could be a section unto itself. For what it’s worth, whereas I was at about 300 deliveries when I wrote that post, I’m at a hair under 2,000 now. Put me in the Hall of Fame of App-Based Serfdom.
Anyway, I’m deviating from the point. Just look at this piece of shit:
Who do you think you are? A supposedly free and abundant resource commodified by corporations, that’s what.
You think you’re better than me? Oh, you crossed out the 35 to add even more bottles? You really are a sick son of a bitch.
When warm weather kicks into gear, something activates in the minds of Takeout Americans. Suddenly, they think to themselves, “Why put my feeble arms and weak legs to use when I can fire up the DoorDash app to make some brokie do the heavy lifting for me?”
Whenever I got a DD shop-and-deliver order from a grocery store last summer, I immediately scrolled through the list of items to see how many cases of water I would have to lug. Only in the rarest of occasions would there not be at least one. Sometimes there’d be three or four. Periodically, I would get customers who would order five of the big cases of water and nothing else. Those are sadists that don’t play around. My personal record belongs to a woman who put in a DoorDash order for 10 (ten!) of these suckers from a BJ’s Wholesale Club, and naturally she lived in an apartment with no elevator so I had to haul them all up the stairs to her unit door. She at least tipped, if memory serves, like $6. Sometimes they don’t!
If I’m delivering to a house, these things are no big deal. I’m a strapping young (ed. note: Mike, you’re 41) lad. It’s when the cases of water are going to high-rise buildings that they are a killer. Because the vast majority of the morons customers who live in high-rises don’t bother to give delivery drivers the door codes to the entrance of their building, it’s important to get everything in one trip. So that means lugging handfuls of bags and probably two of these heavy cases of water while trying to free up a hand to hit buttons on the entrance callbox and the elevator. Inevitably, some annoying busybody will see me struggling in the lobby and chime in, “Why don’t you get one of those grocery carts?” I dunno, maybe because my budget is tight and I don’t want to fork over $30-$40 of my own money to buy something to help me do lowly gig work, and besides, those cheap things break easily. Also, why don’t you deep-throat a bayonet, you nosy motherfucker?
Fate has played many a joke on me the last few years, and the latest is that grocery delivering for a supermarket chain is now my full-time job, in addition to DoorDashing and a few other hustles on the side. I must have loved it so much I made it my main thing. Closer to the truth is that I’ve spent the last few years bouncing around hourly wage dead-end loser jobs that treat me like shit, and the good news is this one actually treats me okay. I even got a dollie for high-rise building deliveries now. Top o’ the world, ma! Some hourly wage dead-end loser jobs are better than others.
The people who order delivery direct from the store as opposed to DoorDash are far and away much friendlier. Maybe because they aren’t paying quite as many exorbitant fees for it. DoorDash enables customers to text their delivery driver while en route and many are not shy about nagging the shit out of you. “Make sure you get the whole order!” “Did you get extra blah blah blah sauce [always sent five minutes after I’ve pulled away from whatever restaurant with their food]” “Don’t you dare leave the order in the lobby. Bring it to my door [rude exhortation sent from a person who didn’t tip]” One time, I was delivering a Chipotle order and was greeted by a elementary school aged black kid who taunted me, “Haha! We didn’t tip you!” Doubtful the kid thought to say that himself. Almost certainly an older sibling or a parent put him up to it. Reacting there is a no-win situation so nothing to do but exhale and keep it moving.
With deliveries direct from the store, the majority of customers are elderly or have mobility issues, so it’s folks who genuinely need delivery services instead of a bunch of lazy slobs. It makes me feel like I’m doing something useful, even if it’s just my job and not exactly charitable acts done out of the kindness of my heart. That kind of thing matters. When I worked at the casino, there were times I felt guilty feeding into destructive habits, however little I personally benefitted from it. When the MGM hack happened last fall, the casino still made us be physically present at the sportsbook counter even though all the computer systems were down. Basically we were standing there taking abuse from frustrated would-be gamblers even though we had no say in anything going on. There was one Saturday in particular where bettors were waiting in line for hours even though we kept telling them there was no assurance that the system would be back up. I was sitting there thinking, oh you all are for-real addicts. By the way, no matter how deranged a gambler acts in the casino, you as an employee aren’t allowed to tell them they have a problem. The most you can do is help them self-isolate if that’s what they choose to do.
So this new job is a slight step in the right direction. More money, more hours, only a four-day workweek, plenty of downtime, even some days I have the opportunity to sneak home and walk my dog in the middle of the shift. I’m still fucked, but slightly less stressed on a day-to-day basis. Hey, I’ll take what I can get.
Ah, but guess what has followed me into my new line of work? Those microplastic-riddled sumbitches.
Most days at the supermarket chain delivery job, they send me out by myself in a van, which is nice and I find it peaceful to be plugging along on my own. Every once in a while on slow days they pair people up in the field to make sure everybody gets their hours. One day they paired me with one of the women drivers and she started complaining about the cases of water. I get it, women drivers have less upper body strength so the cases are more bothersome to them.
“The company should put a cap on the amount of cases people can order at once,” she said.
“Yeah, that would be nice,” I replied. “Ain’t no way they’re telling customers they can’t buy as much of whatever they want, though. Not gonna happen, especially if we’re the only consideration. Sucks, but it is what it is.”
A few days after that, someone must’ve heard me, as I had a delivery with 20 cases. They were the 25-bottle variety, instead of the 40, so not the heaviest, but still wild to think about a home getting 500 bottles of water at once. It went to a Hispanic family that lived on the second floor of a walk-up. The mom sent her two roughly 10-year-old daughters to hold the front door of the building open for me while I carried everything up to their door. One of the girls was very insistent about helping. I was a little unsure at first, but then I let her take the top one of the two I was carrying. She handled it fine and I left the other at the base of the stairs for her to get.
My next trip back from the van, the kid greeted me with a glum look.
“Mom said I can’t help.”
I chuckled. “No worries, I got it.”
At the warehouse where I start my workday, I leave the dispatch office, cross through a cavernous warehouse to the yard where whichever van is assigned to me for the day is parked. When I first started, the warehouse was conspicuously empty. Starting a few weeks ago, however, pallets upon pallets of bottled water cases began showing up. Now the entire warehouse is essentially a football field stacked to the brim with bottled water and nothing but bottled water.
Oh no, I thought to myself, it’s even worse than I imagined. I’m going to be seeing this stuff in my nightmares.
But within a few days, during a morning meeting, we were informed that that sea of bottled water is actually being stored by the company in anticipation of storm relief efforts. Now each time I cross through the warehouse to the yard, I think about how that water will likely consumed by hurricane-ravaged families somewhere along the Gulf Coast within the next few months. Hope it’s refreshing!
It’s gonna be a hell of a summer.