by Shea Stanley
Heads up! Your delivery will be arriving shortly, keep a look out for your driver, who’s trying out a new outfit combo today. See, she’s hung on to that maroon t-shirt for years now out of sentimental value and she never wears it — which Marie Kondo says is okay by the way, because it brings her joy — but she thought she might try to wear it today, so she’s paired it with these suit pants, which actually looks pretty good, she thinks, and she knows you asked for a contactless delivery but if you could look at the outfit while she walks back to her car and yell out a compliment on the color pairing that would really make her day.
Your delivery driver is almost to you, you’ll hear the music as she comes. Currently she’s sustaining herself on Remi Wolf’s Big Ideas — which is sooooo good by the way, have you listened? — but soon she will have milked it dry of all the serotonin it has to offer so if you have any recommendations you can leave them with the tip — which, she wants to say thank you, by the way, for the tip, because it tells her in advance when you’ve tipped so she can tell if the delivery would be worth it, because the computer she works for keeps most of the money for itself, it’s really the tips she lives off of, but she understands, the computer has rent to pay, or something. So any music recommendations would be good, because she’s cycled through all of her go-tos already. Though she probably won’t listen to it until tomorrow, because she can really only listen to new music at the start of her drive when her new music receptors are sharp enough to hook into the music, catching interesting lyrics or cool instrumentals like a fresh trout — is trout desirable when you fish? — but now it’s too late because she can’t listen to new music during the sunset drive home after the late afternoon lunch deliveries, because the hooks are too dulled from hours in the drivers seat to catch anything, even the most interesting of tunes. Instead she relies on what she’s already caught, the Chappell Roan lyrics she has mounted on her wall like a prize.
Sorry, there’s been a delay to your order. Your driver was so struck by the beauty of the sunset over the marsh that she had to pull over to look at it (it’s illegal to be awestruck and drive). The pink and orange were so perfectly blended over the trees that she began to cry tears of joy and tears of everything else. And you know what? She might just like this job, she might just like spending days listening to new music and deciding what fast food she will treat herself to and getting to see new houses and wave to the neighborhood kids who paused their basketball game to let her through. She even likes signing up for the gas station rewards apps and knowing where to get the cheapest gas (would you believe it’s right by her house?). Sure, there are some annoying parts — sometimes she has to deliver to mean nurses who don’t say thank you or even hello and sometimes she accidentally accepts orders that take her 30 minutes out of town which would be fine except she was already outside the town she lives in, she’s in a town an hour away so now she’s an hour and a half away. And sure it takes some mental math to make sure she isn’t spending more on gas than she’s earning, and oh god, the climate impact of so many hours on the road, and probably her car is too old to be logging so many miles on it every day just so Chris R. can have his McDonalds. And yes, it’s a little dystopian, to work for a computer, and she hates that the computer tracks her and tells her when she’s even just slightly over the speed limit (is that really the computer’s business?) and what that kind of surveillance means for the future, and she knows the very existence of the computer boss is putting a strain on local businesses, and she doesn’t want to be apart of that! She loves local business! She would marry local business if she could! But it’s okay, she thinks it’s okay, to love her job, to take joy from a day spent in the car in her maroon shirt, and she won’t have this job forever, it’s really just for right now. And for right now, she just feels lucky, because it’s nice, really, to be out and about, to start when she wants and end when she wants — and to get to see the orange and pink sunset over the marsh. Oh god, we’re really sorry, but the delivery will be delayed even more — she just saw the moon.
listened to this week: Remi Wolf’s Big Ideas