Some jobs show you the stranger parts of society, and most of those are customer service-related.
From unusual expectations to the guys who clearly have a screw loose, you’ll encounter all stripes in the service industry.
For delivery drivers, with their mercifully short interactions, there’s the added element of meeting people in their own environments rather than the neutral ground of a salesfloor.
And sometimes those environments are weird in and of themselves, as one Domino’s delivery driver discovered.
Posting to TikTok under @lowkeyhollylaing, former delivery driver Holly has shared some of her weirder experiences on the job. One in particular stood out.
When you place an order at Domino’s, and indeed with many other delivery services, you can add some special delivery instructions to your order. They’ll usually include things like ‘The buzzer button is a bit stiff’, ‘My door is around the back of the abandoned burger van’, and ‘Don’t worry about the neighbour’s cat, that’s just how she likes to look at people’, but sometimes they can be considerably stranger.
Holly shared several, with the first being ‘shout over the side gate’ instead of knocking or ringing a bell.
"That is literally what they told me to do... I did not do that because I'm not going to do that," she said in one of her videos. As it turned out, this was because the customer was hanging out in their back garden, but you can see why that instruction sat strangely with her.
On the same shift, Holly was instructed to deliver a pizza to a school rather than someone’s home.
"The next order said: 'I'll be out the front of the school in a red hoodie'," she said.
"How weird does that sound? I actually had to deliver to - not an address - to a school gate and he was literally standing there waiting in a red hoodie."
We’re sure there was a legitimate extra-curricular reason for that one… hopefully.
Anyway, third on the list was a highly-detailed set of instructions: "Into car park, turn left, follow around the back, 2 big silver gates, call on arrival.”
"This one wasn't really that weird, but this was an instruction that they gave me. How confusing is that?" Holly explained.
"Just give me an address. Like, how do you expect me to read this while I'm driving? It's like they've given me SatNav instructions."
Another favourite was around a ‘knock and go’ instruction.
"This one was particularly nice. I'm sorry, how rude is that?" she said.
"They obviously didn't want me waiting at the door, but this was like COVID time, you had to wait for them to answer the door, you can't just leave it on their porch. I don't think you can even do that now. So I couldn't 'knock and go', unfortunately for them."
Sadly, she didn’t share the presumably-funny reaction from the customer whose request went unfulfilled that day.
Finally, the pièce de résistance: 'Say belated happy birthday to Mrs Liew from Nick.'
"I'm sorry, what?" Holly said. "Their delivery instruction was for them to say 'Happy Birthday' to someone. Eh?"
Hopefully Mrs Liew appreciated it all the same.
Featured Image Credit: Balaji Srinivasan/Getty ImagesTopics: Fast Food, TikTok, Social Media
Rachael Davis