Deliver Us From Evil

0
585

Did you see where Amazon, the fourth most valuable company in the world, bought Whole Foods? This has the trillion dollar grocery industry all atwitter and even has Wal Mart shakin’ in its shorts. So much so that it came up with the idea of delivering the groceries you order online right to your refrigerator. This is the kind of idea that gets hatched in long meetings around big tables by dudes in low shoes whose phones are smarter than they are.

Wal Mart says the groceries will be delivered by a company called Deliv but I’d worry about any company that can’t even spell Deliver. Supposedly the drivers will have a one-time access code into your home to stock your shelves and you can watch the delivery on your phone from anywhere on the globe. I assume that would include watching your housepest take a bio break.

Personally, I don’t like the concept because going grocery shopping is the only time I take my wife anywhere and it would mean I’d never get to read the checkout literature. I don’t think Wal Mart has thought this idea through or how it might work out in the great spaces in between places. For example…

A ranch woman places her order on WalMart.com because she had to bale hay all day and didn’t have time to shop. Later that day out where the hard road ends, there are no numbered streets, and the voice on the GPS goes silent, the male Deliv driver gets lost and being male, he refuses to stop to ask directions. It didn’t really matter because there was no sign of anyone anyway. You can’t really blame the driver for getting lost because all the screen on his phone said to do was, “turn left at the mail box that looks like it went three rounds with a baseball bat.”

He finally turned down a dirt corduroy road that looked promising but after a half mile all the groceries were covered in dust, the milk had jiggled into butter and the HoHos, chocolate chip ice cream, and Twinkies had congealed into big blobs of sugar. It took the driver 30 minutes to unlock the secret to opening the first of several tight barbed wire gates and his grocery apron hardly provided adequate protection. With dripping blood oozing from pricks all over his arms he looked like he’d been attacked by a paper shredder. Then the  Deliv driver was chased back into his van by what he later described to his boss as, “a grotesque monster that must have weighed ten tons.” Actually, she was just a pet mare looking for a carrot or an apple.

When he finally arrived at the house he was greeted by an assortment of curs who attacked the van with rigor. The driver sacrificed a package of hamburger and threw small chunks out the window to detract them. Then he grabbed two of the six bags and made a run for the door and quickly gained access to the house through a screen porch door with the dogs nipping at his heels. The yard was littered with groceries that had fallen from a broken grocery bag.

He hadn’t even made it out of the mud room before stepping into a mouse trap. and as he was trying to find room in a refrigerator filled with colostrum and antibiotics he heard the distinct click of a firearm. He looked up into the barrel of a Purdy double barrel shotgun.

“Start talking mister,” said the little old lady holding the valuable gun, “and this had better be good!”

‘Uh, are you Nora?”

“Wrong bucko, there’s no Nora here.”

To make a long story short, it  had taken two hours to deliver $100 worth of groceries to the wrong el rancho. The van now needed shocks, a paint job, a new windshield and a new driver because the old one quit immediately after the nearly fatal ordeal.

Two days later you could hear a man in the farmhouse that never got their groceries yell, “Where’s the ketchup? And we’re out of toilet paper too!”

About the same time the family who mistakenly got the delivery came home to find their valuable gun collection had been stolen, probably by a guy matching the description of one ex grocery delivery man.

wwwLeePittsbooks.com

 

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here