Every delivery driver has an ideal customer.
Mine is the one who absolutely does not want to see me.
The best instructions you can possibly leave are:
**Leave at door. Do not knock. Do not ring.**
Some people might think that sounds unfriendly.
To me, it’s beautiful.
Don’t knock? Gladly.
Don’t ring? Wasn’t planning to.
Just leave the food at the door and disappear?
Perfect.
Slightly less perfect is *Leave at door* followed by “please ring the bell.”
Fine. I can live with that.
But **Meet at door**?
Now I have to perform.
I have to meet another human being. Smile. Say *Hi, how are you? Have a good one.*
The truth is, I am not naturally as polite as Uber requires me to be.
But I’m a Diamond driver.
There are standards.
So every *Meet at door* is basically a small acting job.
This morning — Monday morning, naturally — I got one.
McDonald’s.
And, strangely enough, McDonald’s had the order ready almost immediately.
That should have been my first warning.
Things were going too well.
I started driving.
Then the customer messaged me:
**Are you stuck?**
A little later, another message.
I wasn’t stuck. I was literally moving toward her.
My phone was being slow, the messages were arriving late, so I hit the standard **I’m on my way** button and kept going.
For some reason, from the address, I had pictured a house.
I love houses.
You pull up. There’s a door. You put the bag beside it. You leave.
Civilization at its finest.
Then I arrived.
It was not a house.
It was one of those large Montreal condo buildings where entering the building is only the first stage of entering the building.
And immediately I knew:
I was in trouble.
The front door opened, so I went inside. By then I had the apartment number: **210**.
Great.
All I needed was the elevator.
A resident saw me and said:
“No, no. You can’t take the elevator.”
Apparently, I had to go back outside, use the intercom, buzz the apartment, have the customer let me in, and only then would the elevator agree to take me upstairs.
I pointed toward the stairs.
“Can I just take those?”
“No.”
Of course not.
So now I was standing inside a building I had successfully entered, looking at an elevator I was not authorized to use.
The elevator could see me.
I could see the elevator.
But our relationship had not yet been approved.
Back outside I went.
Found the intercom.
Apartment **210**.
Monday morning.
Naturally, I entered **201**.
Someone answered.
I started explaining that I had a McDonald’s delivery.
The person on the intercom, quite reasonably, had absolutely no idea why I was telling them this.
For a few seconds I was probably just a strange man standing outside their building trying to give them a breakfast they had never ordered.
Then I looked at the screen.
201.
Right.
I apologized.
Tried again.
210.
This time the door opened, the system accepted my credentials, and the elevator finally decided I was a person of sufficient character to visit the second floor.
When the doors opened upstairs, the customer was already standing there waiting for me.
How long she had been standing there, I chose not to ask.
I handed her the McDonald’s.
She gave me that perfectly polite Canadian smile that can mean anything from:
“Thank you so much.”
to:
“How has this man survived this long?”
I smiled back.
Diamond driver.
Standards.
And once again I was reminded why my favourite customer is the one who writes:
**Do not knock. Do not ring. Leave at door.**
We understand each other perfectly.
Mostly because we never meet.