Flower Delivery Kitty

Well, that little side gig Master Pravus was doing just for Valentine’s day has turned into a sort of full time thing.  During the week it doesn’t start until 2PM, which means that Master Pravus can be awake early looking for permanent work, but on the weekend it starts really early in the morning and can run really late depending on how far they send us out.

You can deliver flowers 24 hours to hospitals, they are always open.  You can’t deliver flowers all hours to residences, though, so we do those first.  We show up and they give us a huge list of flowers to deliver and depending on how far-flung they are we sometimes aren’t home until nine or ten at night.  It’s a job.  Not a very good job, but it does pay the bills.  A lot of people bring a friend or their wife because many bits of the job are not paid (yes, that’s legal, it turns out) and if you don’t like it, you can just not take the job. 

This is not an hourly paying job.  It pays per successful delivery, and that’s all.  There’s lots of side bits (wrapping flowers, calling successful flower runs into the hotline, etc) that do not pay a cent, and if you drive all the way out to a place and the person isn’t home, guess what?  You don’t get paid.  You might think that doesn’t happen too often, but it happens at least a couple times a night and it sucks.  Some nights it happens more nights than others and it’s really sucky. 

Still, it just barely pays the bills, and it affords us the flexibility for Master Pravus to go to interviews, get calls from head hunters etc, and he can stay home during the mornings and early afternoons entirely during the week and seriously job hunt.  This makes job hunting a lot easier than other side jobs which would be more rigid with him and want him there and not let him answer his phone, etc.

I don’t do a ton to be that helpful, really.  I can’t lift anything super heavy (hernia, Ehlers-Danlos, etc.) but I can lift some of the smaller vases as well as the clip-board and I can wrap the smaller flowers up for Master Pravus while he runs the bigger ones to the car. 

The first day I was learning the way to wrap them (it’s specific, oh, and as I pointed out non-paid! But, if you don’t wrap them, you don’t get paid, so you have to wrap them.  Joy!)  anyway, it took us an hour to wrap the entire route of twenty-five plants.  The next day, it took us thirty minutes to wrap nineteen plants, but then again, some of those were huge!  One of them was a giant floor plant.  It’s kind of a miracle Master Pravus got it to fit in the bag.  The florists were in shock!  HA!

I also am able to make notes on the clipboard while Master Pravus is bringing the deliveries in to residences.  I can type the next address into the GPS, so that way we’re able to get to the next stop faster because by the time he’s in the car we’re ready to zip to the next shop and get to the next place even faster!  Little things like that, you know?

Well, we really spend very little time in the shop itself.  We pick up our order and spend hours on the road and then go back the next day if they need us.  So far they need us every day.  Master Pravus only just started bringing me a couple days ago, and so far everyone has been really welcoming pretty much, except one lady.  One really old lady.  It kind of started with a really minor wardrobe malfunction.  I was wearing this dress:

As you can see, the dress goes almost to my knees.  It’s not really short.  It isn’t low cut either.  I was wrapping flowers, when the old lady (we’ll call her Felicia, not her real name.) pulled Master Pravus over to apparently talk about how I was dressed inappropriately.

Oddly enough, the night before I asked Master Pravus if he could hold up a couple dresses for me to see which one was longer.  I’m that careful about these things, so that’s really just not the kind of talk he thought that he’d have with anyone in the shop.  She said that they have a really “casual” dress code, but it isn’t that casual and he’d better not let me deliver flowers the way I was dressed because it was completely inappropriate.  Dress code, dress code, dress code.  She said.  Master Pravus explained to her that he had no clue what she was talking about, that I was wearing shorts, etc.  When he turned the corner he finally saw the problem, my dress accidentally got tucked into my jacket! 

Why she didn’t just say anything to me was beyond me!  Has that literally happened to no one else?  I can think of two other times I had tucked my skirt into my panties and went out in public and no one said anything.  I felt so embarrassed.  One human being to another, you’d think she could have just said “Faete, you accidentally tucked your skirt into your jacket when you were wrapping flowers.”  It wasn’t a dress code issue..  It was a wardrobe malfunction. 

Involving Master Pravus seemed silly, but..  Fine.  I fixed it, and it was fine you know?  I even went home in between delivery loads to get a longer pair of shorts so it wouldn’t happen again.  But she made a huge mountain out of a mole hill.  I didn’t come into work with my skirt tucked in on purpose..  It happened by accidentally for goodness sakes!  As you can see from the picture, I didn’t come in wearing something short, so it bothered me that she acted like I did.

Well, even after I changed Felicia was determined to be a pain in the rear.  I had to still interact with her and she continued to give me dirty looks despite wearing longer shorts (and I was wearing shorts earlier, it wasn’t like my ass was showing).  She kept giving me dirty looks.  I had to hand her a vase and she seemed angry about it.  When I left I wished everyone a good day just as Master Pravus was doing and she looked us both in the eyes and while everyone else was saying goodbye to us both and wishing us goodbye on our runs she said “Goodbye Paul,” and did not say my name. 

Every place of work has one person who is a thorn in your side, and I am guessing it is going to be Felicia.  When we got out of the shop, even Master Pravus thought that was kind of obvious and rude of her.  The fact that I went home and even changed to put on longer shorts to make it less likely that I’d have a problem again should have shown I was trying to make the effort, but she was still salty for some reason.  Master Pravus says she’s probably jealous that I’m so cute.  HA HA HA.  Either way, I’m just going to be polite.  I literally see the office folks for less than an hour a day so we have to figure out how to get along.  Why she’s being petty, I don’t even know.

Everyone else loves Master Pravus and is super welcoming to me.  “Oh, we’re so glad you’re helping Paul!”  “It goes so much faster with two people!”  “Now Paul won’t be alone on these long routes!”  Etc!  Plus, now I’m not alone for these long, long stretches either.  <3

It’s not ideal at all, but it’s helping us get by for now.  Grateful for what it is.