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Becoming an Uber Eats mensch

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

Looking back over my recent posts, I note that I have not yet updated you on my progress as an Uber Eats delivery driver. No doubt that omission accounts for the unsettled state of the commonwealth lately.

I can report that I’ve gone out on two evenings, and made a total of three deliveries. I messed up each of them in some way, but I remain (to my own surprise) undaunted. I approach the experience with fear, and am full of self-criticism the following day – but while I’m actually driving, there’s a strange sense of exhilaration. I thought I was immune to the thrill of novelty, but apparently even old dogs can enjoy new tricks.

The first night was last Thursday around 5:00 p.m. It was cool and misty out. I drove up to Brooklyn Center, near the ancient ruins of Brookdale Mall, because there are a lot of fast food places in that area. After receiving a bunch of ridiculous job suggestions (Uber Eats always throws a lot of low-paying – even money-losing – rides at you when you first log on), I got an order for about $6.00 for a ride of about 2 miles (as I recall). I took that and drove to Wing Stop. I carried my newly purchased hot bag (red in color) inside. The order was ready, but it took a couple minutes to get the clerk’s attention. At last he handed me the sack, and also a cup, telling me the customer wanted a Dr. Pepper, and I needed to fill that myself at the automated fountain.

This is where I messed up, no doubt due to nerves. I filled the cup, snapped a lid on it, took a straw, and then (stupidly) put the cup in the bag with the food, zipping them both inside.

When I got out to my car, I had some frightened moments, wondering what I’d done with the drink. When I looked in the hot bag, there it was, and of course it had tipped over. Some of the pop had spilled. I emptied the spilled soda pop onto the ground, and drove to make my delivery. The customer, as promised, met me outside their house, and the delivery was completed. The paper sack was a little wet, but not too bad, I thought.

I would have done another run, but of course my hot bag was now wet with soda pop inside. I opted to go home and wash it out. It was enough that I’d done a delivery, I figured. Take things in baby steps.

Friday was full of other matters, so I went out again Saturday evening. I thought I’d lurk in the town of Crystal instead of Brooklyn Center that night. There are a lot of eating places around there too. But when a decent job showed up, it sent me right back to Brooklyn Center. As I drove, another offer showed up (we call that “stacking.” It means you can do two deliveries in roughly the same area, saving time and increasing pay). So I took that too. (In trepidation, but I took it.)

My first stop was Panda Express. Drove in, and that’s when the trouble started. The Uber Eats app was absolutely certain I had not arrived yet. The map said I was there, but the app wasn’t doing what it was supposed to do when you arrive (as I understood it). I went in and got the order, but in my car, I was still unable to inform the app that I was where I was. Not only could I not proceed to the delivery map, I couldn’t make my second pickup either.

In desperation, I called the deliveree and asked for their address. I drove to their place under the guidance of Google Maps, and made the delivery. Then I called support and explained to somebody in India what had happened. He said they’d fix it and give me credit for the delivery. I asked if I should still do the second delivery, and he said I should.

So I went to Little Caesar’s Pizza. Same problem. I solved it the same way, and made a similar call to India.

At that point I figured either the app was glitching, or (somehow more likely) I was doing something wrong. I decided to close up shop for the night and do some research on how to use the app properly.

Tonight my friend from my Bible study group, the guy who urged me to take this mad course in the first place, has promised to ride along with me for one delivery, to show me what I’m doing wrong. Once that’s accomplished, I assume the low places will be exalted and the high places made low, and I will sweep all before me, going from strength to strength.

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Life is full of surprises when you’re absent-minded

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Photo credit: Getty Images. Unsplash license.

What progress have I made in easing into Uber Eats driving?, you ask breathlessly. “Well,” I can say, “I watched a few more instructional videos, and (with much prayer and fasting) I also opened the actual app and set up a couple things.

Baby steps.

A funny thing happened the other day while I was working on the magazine for the Valdres Samband (an organization for descendants of immigrants from a particular region of Norway), which I edit.

A while back, one of my stalwart helpers sent me a link to an autobiography, the length of a short book, by one of the pioneer Norwegian pastors in the Midwest. Because of its length, I’ve split the work into three sections for publication– and an appended tribute to his wife will constitute a fourth installment. Good reading for historically-minded people, which our members tend to be.

But I had some trouble working with the text, which came to me in a pdf. You can copy and paste from a pdf to a Word document, but you’ve got to watch it every minute, because the algorithm often mistakes words (especially Norwegian words) and punctuation. And one of the pages got scanned crooked. That one couldn’t be copied and pasted at all; it would have to be transcribed. I was trying to print that page to work from, because it’s a pain to switch from one browser tab to another, but my printer had gone on strike (we have since come to an accommodation).

And then, while going through my saved files, I discovered a Word document with the same title as the biography. I opened it and – what do you know? – I had already edited the whole document for publication, and forgotten about it completely. I guess I did it after I finished the last issue, just to ease my future labors. Ungrateful wretch that I am, I failed to remember my own generosity to myself.

Is this a sign of approaching dementia? Could be, but I think I’ve always been like this. “Boy, you’ve got a one-track mind,” my dad used to say. Once a thing is out of my sight, I tend to forget its existence. Which explains why nothing’s ever put away in my house. Also my social life.

I’ve probably got the Great American Novel tucked away somewhere around here, lost down the memory hole.

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Driven to extremes

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Photo credit, Why Kei, whykei. Unsplash license.

From time to time in this space I’ve announced exciting new developments in my employment history. I’m afraid I may have bragged a little, boasting about translation jobs and books (self-) published.

Today I must humble myself, as is appropriate in Lent. My delusions of grandeur are past. My pomp has taken physic. I have signed up to drive for Uber Eats.

I complained of my financial challenges to the guys in my Bible study, and one of them kept urging me to try UE. “You can work when you want,” he says, “and pick your jobs.” Also, you don’t need a very nice car, like an Uber driver, which matters in my case.

So I did it. My understanding was that the vetting process would take a few days, but I got approved in one. I was not prepared for this; I figured I’d have more time to summon up my blood and play the tiger. However, the YouTube videos I’ve been watching suggest that you really ought to have a hot bag to keep your orders warm (or cold), and my order for one of those won’t show up till Thursday. So I’ll hold off till then.

On Thursday, I’ll probably come up with another excuse for delay. I am, to say the least, a timid driver.

The great joke of it has not escaped me – I lost my translating gig due to Artificial Intelligence, and this job is likely to go the same way. Even as I write (according to news reports), Uber is testing out self-driving delivery vehicles.

I suppose we all wonder where this will end. What job is safe from our digital overlords? I’m convinced that AI will never do creative work to match human art. But what it can do is work cheap. It’s the ultimate illegal immigrant, undercutting wages for the natives.

But if nobody has a job anymore, who’s going to buy all those cheap products? And how will mere humans subsist?

Perhaps after the Great Revolution, every human will be assigned a personal robot. That robot will do the human’s work, and the human will be paid for it, being legally responsible for the maintenance of the machine.

But what will we do with our spare time, then? Judging by our current behavior in the first stages of AI, I’m not optimistic.

Reviews, Uncategorized

A medicine for melancholy

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Photo credit: weston m, shootnmatch. Unsplash license.

Beautiful day in Robbinsdale; the first really beautiful day of the year. The temperature soared to 70 degrees. Tomorrow will only be 45, and Friday colder yet, but still. It happened. We had a nice day. Means a lot in Minnesota.

I went to see my doctor this morning, to have him look at a small infection in one of my fingers. It wasn’t swollen to the size of a Hostess Twinkie, and it didn’t hurt all that much, but it just wouldn’t heal up. I’ve tolerated it for about a month, faithfully feeding it Neosporin and re-bandaging it twice a day, but it refuses to take the hint. So, shame-faced, feeling like a sissy, I went to see my personal physician. I fully expected him to sneer and tell me to rub some dirt on it, but he dutifully prescribed an antibiotic.

Now I’m waiting for the prescription. I am, to tell the truth, growing disillusioned with Walgreens. The last prescription my doctor sent them sat unfilled for a week, until I went in personally and requested an explanation. (They needed my new insurance information as it turned out, but they might have – you know – sent me a message informing me of the problem.) Now I’m pretty sure I’m going to have to go in and hold them up for my Miracle Bread Mold. I remember an old gag from Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, where somebody wanders into the Dogpatch post office and asks if there’s any mail for him, and the postmaster drawls, “Well, looky here – Ah got this Speshul Dee-livery letter fer yuh 20 years ago. Ah been meanin’ to drop it off next time I was in your neck o’ the woods.” Walgreens seems to have adopted a similar policy for prescriptions.

That wasn’t even what I meant to post about tonight.

I wanted to talk a little more about April’s Fool by Scott Bell, the delightful cop novel I reviewed last night. When I ask myself, what made it so much fun? the answer was easy – the hero was cheerful.

You realize how rare cheerful main characters are in today’s fiction?

Now I’m not exactly a world ambassador for happiness. I’m known, among my constantly shrinking circle of friends, as the Ancient Mariner at every wedding, the Banquo at every feast.

But I am not immune to the charm of a cheerful voice. I can’t produce the effect, but I can respond to it.

We have a highly false stereotype in literature, it seems to me, that says happiness equals shallowness (I blame the Russians). Anyone who acquires a teaspoon full of wisdom, our stories proclaim, must necessarily be plunged into despair.

Several of the police mystery series I follow – and enjoy – have heroes that blur together in my memory. I can’t distinguish one from the other, because they all have the same back story. Every bloody one of them is mourning the death of a beloved wife. He has never gotten over it, and he obsesses on his job to mask his grief.

I’m not saying it’s entirely unrealistic. But it’s become a trope.

Life, you’ll note, isn’t like that. Aren’t the best leaders people who know how to raise other people’s spirits? Aren’t optimistic people more likely to succeed than pessimists (such as I)?

If we want to be realistic as writers, shouldn’t most of our heroes (unless we’re writing tragedy) be optimists?

I think this qualifies as testimony against interest, so you should pay attention.

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Avaldsnes, yet again

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I had a great topic for my blog post tonight. A brilliant intellectual insight. But I wanted to review the last couple books I read while my memory was fresh, so I postponed posting it. Tonight, when I need the topic… nothing. Memory wiped. I know there were two points, but I’ve got nothing to spear them into.

No doubt that lost post would have changed the world. Darkness will now fall on civilization, and millions will die, because I didn’t take the trouble to make a note of my transcendent brainstorm.

My bad.

As a substitute, I’ve got the tourist video above, telling you about Avaldsnes in Norway, a place about which I’ve wearied you multiple times already. This video concentrates on the North Way historical interpretative center, which I visited on my last trip.

Avaldsnes played a major role in my Erling books, and it ought to feature largely in the Haakon the Good book I’m working on now, too. Also I have family roots there, so if I can steer some tourist traffic that way, it’s all to the good.

I don’t even get a kickback.

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Mortal musings

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Photo credit: Pablo Merchán Montes. Unsplash license.

The longer you live, the more buildings you know your way around get torn down, and the more people you used to know get buried. They may be good friends, and you parted in friendship but moved to another state. You may only brush elbows and part ways, and you never see or hear from them again, but you remember them for some odd reason.

A while back I did a web search for a woman I once asked out on a date, decades ago when I lived in Florida (she turned me down). She had died of Covid.

The other day, I recalled a fellow I knew only slightly, in one of the three colleges I attended (I won’t say just which one). I wondered what kind of life he’d lived, because his prospects hadn’t looked good from where I stood.

The main thing I remembered about him was his name. I won’t tell you his surname, but it’s one of those Germanic monikers that basically waves a flag and whistles, inviting mean little boys to make a dirty joke out of it. I pitied him for having such a name hung on him at birth, and always assumed the name probably had a lot to do with his personality. Because he was, to put it mildly, a “difficult” guy. Rebellious against the rules. Touchy. Quick to anger. Vicious with an insult. He wasn’t popular with his classmates at all.

I remember making a conscious choice to be civil to him. To speak to him pleasantly, and with respect. And (at least as I remember it), the last time he spoke with me, he treated me in a civil way also. I took some satisfaction in that. The list of social situations I’ve handled well in my life is, after all, a short one.

Anyway, it turns out he’s dead too, just a few months ago. The obit didn’t say what he died of, but I studied it with interest. He seems to have found a place in the world. A steady, long-time job, family, friends, pets.

The obituary said nothing about a marriage or children, though.

I suppose we were brothers, in a way. He didn’t fit in in one way, I in another.

Anyway, I hope he found grace.

Reading, Uncategorized, Writing

Early spring ruminations

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Photo credit: nyegi. Unsplash license

We’re at the dirty end of spring right now. It was cold for a couple days, but we got up near 50 (Fahrenheit) today, and the whole week is supposed to be mild. (Thank Providence, I defrosted my freezer last week.) Most of the snow is gone now; just some crusty edges left – which doesn’t mean we won’t get more snow. We probably will. But that will be short-lived. The ground made visible now is unlovely – dead grass and black dirt. A monochrome, frostbit world.

This week is for me a wild social whirl, which means I had/have two things going on. Or three, if you call a doctor’s visit a social event. That was Monday. I had to see my clinic’s Diabetic Educator. As it says somewhere in Job, “The thing I have greatly feared has come upon me.” (Norman Vincent Peale quotes that repeatedly in his Positive Thinking books.) It actually wasn’t as bad as I feared. The nice lady didn’t put me on a diet. I’ve got some documents I need to get around to reading, but what I took away was mostly that I needed to consume fewer carbs and more fiber. Fiber, apparently, can buffer the carbs in your digestive system, reducing insulin spikes. Good to know.

(Note: I don’t have full-blown diabetes. But I am On the Road. Enough to make lifestyle changes advisable.)

The day before, Sunday, when I was still ignorant of this wisdom, I attended a Swedish Meatball Supper in a church basement. Meatballs for protein, and green beans for fiber to counteract the mashed potatoes. Could be worse. We were fed by Swedes, and it’s always pleasant for a Norwegian to be served by Swedes, after the humiliation of the Outrageous Union of 1814, which we have never yet forgiven.

I was impressed that they served us off china plates. I’ve eaten many a church basement meal, but I think it’s been a decade at least since I last ate in a church basement off anything but paper or Styrofoam. I cannot but salute the diligence of the organizers, who took the extra trouble to wash dishes afterward.

I must also salute my friends, Mark and Renae, who invited me along.

Friday is going to be less pleasant. I’ll be attending the funeral of one the guys from my men’s Bible study. A fine guy who loved the Lord. He used to wear bowties to church, so several of us from the study will be wearing them in his honor. I had to order one from Amazon, but I got next-day delivery, and it’s here now.

Reading notes: The book I’m reading right now (I’ll review it soon; maybe tomorrow) did something that pleased me a lot. A small thing, but it delighted me.

One point I’ve thought about occasionally, over my many years as a reader and writer, was a very trivial issue – the lack of same-name characters in fiction.

This is what I mean – in real life, people with the same first name often show up in the same circles. My Bible study group, for instance, though numbering only eight men on a good night, has two Toms and two Daves in it.

But in fiction, this rarely happens. The reason is obvious, and entirely sensible – it confuses the reader. Unless a plot point requires it, it’s so much easier to just give two characters different names. And since the author is the god of the fictional world, that’s his prerogative.

But in this book, there’s a scene where somebody says, “I was talking to Kate and Kate….” This wasn’t confusing to the reader, because Kate and Kate are throwaway bit characters who never appear again. But the line adds just a half-millimeter of verisimilitude, since we all know that such things happen not infrequently in real life.

That’s a nice literary touch. Wish I’d thought of it.

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In memoriam, Robert Duvall

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This day sort of didn’t happen for me, in some sense. Yesterday I did a lecture which involved a long drive, and today I was just wiped out. Slept late, accomplished little in the writing realm except for some research-related reading.

Robert Duvall has died. I don’t know if he was my favorite actor; I just don’t think in those terms. But I think he was the actor I trusted most.

He came up in the same generation as Pacino and Hackman, but he identified better than any other actor with the common people of America. Speaking as a farmer’s son, I believed him utterly when he presented himself as a redneck. His contemporaries didn’t have that touch, and (I suspect) didn’t even want it.

I became a Duvall fan, I think, when I read him quoted in a newspaper, many years ago. I don’t remember the words exactly, of course, but it went something like this – “Southern governors ought to place roadblocks at their state lines, and turn back every Hollywood film crew that tries to cross. ‘We know what you want to do here,’ they should say, ‘and we’re not putting up with it.’”

His performance as Robert E. Lee in “Gods and Generals” was the only portrayal of the man that ever satisfied me.

His actual origins were privileged and pure California. His father was an admiral, his mother an actress. He was raised as a Christian Scientist, though he later said he didn’t attend church at all.

And yet, in “Tender Mercies” (clip above) and “The Apostle” he gave portrayals of born-again Christians that rang true as a solid gold dollar in a collection plate.

R.I.P., Robert Selden Duvall. Well done.

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Farvel, Høstfest

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A Hostfest breakfast crowd in the glory days. This was just one of the halls.
Me with 4 Lagerthas, the year they did TV promotion.

It’s not as if I hadn’t seen it coming, but still it’s shock: Norsk Høstfest of Minot, North Dakota, long the largest Scandinavian festival in the US, announced today that it had closed its doors for the last time.

Since 1978, except for the Covid hiatus, people streamed to Minot (one of the remotest cities in America) every fall for an astonishing combination of Scandinavian crafts, food, and culture, along with stadium shows featuring big-name entertainment (largely, but not exclusively, country and western music). The crowds were huge in its heyday, with every room in town booked. Thousands of folks rolled in to camp in RVs, and day tour buses arrived in convoys. If you had a hankering to see people in cowboy hats and Norwegian sweaters, Høstfest was the place to go.

Our Viking Age Club & Society was part of it from very early on (I myself only started attending around the turn of the millennium, but I guess I was involved in about half the festival’s history). Ron, one of our old members, attended for 25 straight years and had all kinds of stories to tell about the celebrities he’d met, back when the entertainers used to mingle more freely with the public. He taught Victor Borge to make butted mail. He slung one of the Mandrell sisters over his shoulder and carried her into his tent (for a photo op). He had beers (nothing more, he insisted) with Willie Nelson in his trailer.

My chief memories are of the years we spent in what they called “Copenhagen Hall,” where the Oak Ridge Boys did three concerts a day right around the corner. We Vikings used to do three combat shows a day (four on Saturday). Just getting in and out of my armor got to be exhausting, after a while, as I got older.

They put us up in homes with local families, and we all made long-lasting friendships. I’ll miss those people.

I’ll even kind of miss the 9-hour drive to northern North Dakota. Other group members mostly took the dogleg route through Bismarck, which added an hour, but I followed my GPS on a diagonal path that took me through towns most people have never heard of.

It was a good place sell my books. I’ve lost three festivals in the last couple years. That will hurt. Fortunately, a new one started last year, and another is coming this spring.

But there’ll never be another Høstfest. Quirky, very American, fueled by community pride and voluntarism, two commodities in increasingly short supply these days.

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Time lost on the road

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Photo credit: Claudio Schwarz. Unsplash license.

Today was one of those days where life reaches down into your calendar and reminds you that there are bigger priorities than the ones you’ve scrawled on your schedule. I went to a funeral today. It was the funeral of my uncle Ralph, not a blood uncle but the husband of one of my mother’s sisters. In terms of our family tree, this leaves but one survivor standing – also an uncle by marriage – in his generation.

Ralph was a plain, cheerful, energetic man who seemed to have discovered the fountain of youth until almost the very end. He worked as a telephone lineman, one of those guys who climb the poles at any time of the day, in any kind of weather. He owned every hand tool known to man, and his eidetic memory knew precisely where they could be located (often in the trunk of his car). If somebody needed something fixed, it was his great joy to jump in and help – and he knew how to do it right, too.

I don’t recall ever hearing a word said against Ralph. He lived into his 90s.

I must confess I was late to the funeral. My brain was absolutely convinced that to travel 2 ½ hours and arrive at 10:00 a.m., I needed to set out around 8:30. The logic of this calculation seems just as unassailable to me as it is wrong in reality.

I’ve done this sort of thing before. I don’t know what my problem is. Certainly it must be partly due to my functional innumeracy. Also I blame my difficulty in visualizing spatial relationships. I need to teach myself (even at this advanced age) to sit down and draw a clock face, and then shade in the hours, when I’m planning a trip.

On the drive I listened to the audiobook of Klavan’s When Christmas Comes. Almost wished the drive was longer.

The same goes for life.