Delivering news, but now it’s time for a screen break
Four and a half years after switching to home working and the teenagers can still conjure up ever more inventive ways to ignore the fact that when I’m working from home I’m actually working and not at their beck and call.
The latest attempt to find me something to do, other than editing newspapers, arrived with the failure of the fast food delivery driver to deliver all of the fast food they had ordered and paid for online.
When no one from either the big name fast food chain or the big name delivery firm would answer the phone then the teenage solution was, “well, you will just have to drive us to get it.”
The fact I was oblivious to their decision to order their lunch to the doorstep illustrates just how focused I was on doing the bit in the day which pays the bills for such extravagances.
And, it almost goes without saying, no-one had actually offered me a share of the bounty before they hit ‘order’ in the online checkout.
It is not the first time the big name fast food chain’s delivery service has messed up an order and, by coincidence, on both occasions that messing up of the order has left the teenagers with less food than expected, not more.
Best not to think too hard about it. So just to clarify, someone ordered food without telling me (the teenagers), someone else has failed to do their job (put food in a brown paper bag) and it’s left to me to park my job (editing newspapers) to head off for a potential confrontation, not of my making, in the hope of getting some food, I probably paid for, which I won’t get to eat.
How’s that for a fair deal without any possibility of a square meal?
It’s not as if I even got a cheesy bite out of the lukewarm food which did arrive as ordered.
Of course, the whole point of ordering the food to be delivered is because the big name fast food chain is a drive away, so off we went, leaving my desk unattended like one of those “home shirkers” The Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph are convinced all home workers to be – snide, insinuating articles written by people who are likely home workers themselves.
Once at the big name fast food giant’s counter there was no confrontation as the manager handed over the missing chicken nuggets with neither scrutiny, argument nor apology but the air of man only too familiar with fixing food-shy orders.
If only we had been dishonest enough to add another missing item to the order then at least we would have had some recompense for our troubles.