Paperboy

I got up this morning and looked out my front door to see if anything had been delivered. Upon doing so, I was greeted by the sight of no newspaper on the porch, and no newspaper further down at the edge of the driveway. This, curiously, is actually correct behavior, though you wouldn't know it if you had driven by any morning since Monday.

I should probably explain. For something like twenty weeks now, we've been signed up for Sunday only newspaper service. Before that we were getting Friday-Sunday service as there is no weekend only for whatever reason. Before that, for years, we were on daily service, which is the last time they got it consistently right. Shortly after downgrading to the three day service, we noticed that we would get the newspaper on seemingly random days. No two consecutive weeks would pass with exactly six papers delivered on the correct three days. This probably shouldn't be rocket science, but somehow they just couldn't get it right. Almost every time the deliveryman failed to deliver on a day he was supposed to, Mom called to complain about it. The dispatcher always had some excuse about a new deliveryman or that the regular one was sick for months at a time which caused a substitute or something else asinine and pathetic of that sort. Finally she was fed up and canceled the service entirely.

This should probably offend most of you, as newspapers for years were delivered by young children on bicycles with a far higher success rate than this. In fact they made a video game about it, sharing a name with this entry in fact. Of course, that was not unintentional. I was never particularly good at this game, truth be told, though I never really played it on anything but somebody else's Game Boy, so I never really had the time to get good. It occurred to me for a moment that perhaps I'm being too hard on the deliveryman as a result, but I quickly dismissed that as terribly stupid of me. For starters, newspapers are now mostly delivered by grown men in cars, not young boys on bicycles. Furthermore Paperboy, like all video games based on mundane activities, is full of artificial challenge boosts because if it were particularly realistic it would be a horribly boring game.

No, whoever was responsible for this mistake was a moron of the highest order. However, Mom quickly missed the paper, and the paper itself missed our money, so they offered to give her 13 weeks without payment, and if she was still dissatisfied no payment would be necessary. At some point during this mess, the deliveryman decided (though he is not alone from what I've heard) that the Sunday paper was getting too large with all the inserts and the added bulk of the paper itself, so he was going to add those to the thinner Saturday paper instead. Of course, this meant if he failed to deliver on Saturday (as he was wont to do) we wouldn't get them even if he did deliver a Sunday paper. Also this seemed problematic as this latest attempt at service (the free 13 weeks) was Sunday only. How would he accomplish this? Wouldn't that mean stuffing some papers with the inserts and some without? How does that help the overall problem? Wouldn't that actually be more work and make things more confusing? There are answers to these questions, and all of them are what you'd expect if you assume this was a stupid idea. Well, behold and lo, at the end of 13 weeks we probably had 13 papers delivered, but not all of them were on Sunday nor were all the Sundays covered. Not even close actually.

The dispatcher begged Mom over the phone for one last chance, and for some reason she gave it to them. Well somehow the moron managed to get it right, delivering a full paper between the storm door and main front wooden door on our porch. He also delivered the thinner paper-only bit to the porch, but not between the doors. Strange, but at least we got what we ordered. Well despite this not even bringing their accuracy to 50% she decided to pay up for the next cycle (thinking back I'm not sure if we had to pay for the previous weeks after deciding they were not worthless [though they were] or if they were completely free). Since then we've gotten the paper every Sunday but one, usually with the inserts on Saturday, and Sunday, and occasionally with an insert-free copy also on Sunday anyway, and usually on the porch despite there never being a request to do that. Also of course they would often deliver on various days that are not Sunday or even Saturday but not for the entire week as you expect of the promotional free weeks newspaper companies enjoy doing in vain.

I cannot understand how these buffoons fail so utterly at such a simple concept week in and week out, but I don't really care; it isn't my money paying for their mistakes, and frankly they're actually losing money on us due to their incompetence so I at least get a smile of schadenfreude. Perhaps we should actually return to the age of small children delivering papers from their bikes, or at least require some sort of test before allowing someone to take on this seemingly difficult job. Perhaps set a benchmark score in Paperboy for job acceptance. Can't make things any worse than they are right now.

Update: An unfamiliar newspaper on the sewing machine in my garage (don't ask) found when getting the mail leads me to believe I may have been premature in suggesting they got something right.  It's more likely he simply didn't deliver to the door for no good reason this time, but still delivered erroneously.