Number of Deliveries: 10
Sales: $529.63
Tips: $48
Hours: 3.02
Total Wage: $23.89 per hour
My first run of the night goes well, with each of the two deliveries giving me $5 tips (one order was $29.58, and the other was $36.22). When I get back, Bis, a driver from Nepal, says to me, "You're lucky tonight," because I line up with a $232.82 order. I tell him you never know what you're going to get with these "whales," and since I'm delivering it as a one-bagger, my next hour almost exclusively depends on the kindness of these strangers. When I get to the house, I'm directed to the kitchen to unload all the food, then I wait for the hip, 30-something-year-old dad, who's dressed like a teenage Moto X star, to come pay me. He counts out $248 dollars and asks if a $14 tip is cool. I say yeah, but don't point out he's giving me a $15.18 tip, nor do I tell him, actually, that a 6.52% tip sucks.
I'm still doing alright, since I've made $24 in the first hour of work. But I've done something to upset the delivery gods, and the night goes on with less than lucrative tipping: $1.37 on $22.63 (6%); $2.10 on $27.90 (7.5%); and $3.71 on $57.29 (6.5%). I could really use a weekly sermon about how good I have it right now. Instead, I'll end up leaving work early, thinking about how much I should have made.
Midway through the night, I get a delivery to the Black Mountain Road area, a place I've never been at the southeast corner of our delivery zone. Upper Donaker St. contains 3-4 bedrooms homes built in the late 1980s, currently selling in the mid $200,000s, which is inexpensive for San Diego. While the ethnic shift in this neighborhood from the whiteness of Rancho is noticeable––an Asian man stands on a ladder messing with his roof gutters; an Indian woman strolls down the street––what's strikes me most is the change in landscaping. The occasional dry or uncut lawns, sparse vegetation, and less exotic plants not only indicate less income, but they're also more representative of the four years of drought that San Diego is currently experiencing.
I spend so much time driving through the eucalyptus forest that is Rancho Santa Fe and delivering to homes with regularly maintained, regal lawns and yards shaded in tropical canopies of expensive palms and banana trees, I sometimes forget what a middle-class yard looks like. While both areas are currently regulated by the same level 2 drought condition restrictions, you'd never know it in Rancho Santa Fe.
The Santa Fe Irrigation District, which provides the water to Rancho and Fairbanks, as well as Solana Beach, may list the same restrictions and politely remind their customers on their website to "continue your efforts to meet our 6% voluntary reduction target," but I don't see evidence in the lush, green yards of any water use reduction. I doubt the issuing of a warning letter followed by minimal fines would prevent anyone with a yard worth tens of thousands of dollars from watering their tropical paradises and golf course-like lawns. Some would say the rich can afford the water, which is an insane concept when it comes to common natural resources: they should be an equally shared, inalienable right.
I'm thinking the water districts should adopt something like the Finnish sliding scale
used when issuing traffic tickets, where one is fined relative to one's income. This allows for traffic tickets with astronomical amounts, such as $71,400 and a record $141,661. The thinking behind such a law is that a traffic ticket should hurt each person equally, and an across the board $75 fine for speeding, say, hurts a poor person much more than it does a rich person. Therefore, the fine discourages only the poor person from speeding in the future. The same goes with water use.
But, right now, the people of Rancho Santa Fe are much more concerned with saving their beloved, unnatural, Australian eucalyptus forest from the longhorn borer beetle, also of Australia, which you can read all about in this L.A. Times article. The residents have given U.C. Riverside $20,000 to conduct a study whereby the entomology department introduced 100 Syngaster lepidus wasps from, you guessed it, Australia, because the wasps destroy the beetle larvae with their own young. That's $200 per wasp. Not only are the residents of Rancho Santa Fe willing to shell out another $20,000 for each of the next two years to save their 100,000 eucalyptus trees (that's $6 per tree, if you don't count the already dead trees), they are carrying on a time honored European tradition of introducing non-native species into a habitat, then introducing more non-native species to combat the unforeseen problems caused by their tinkering with mother nature in the first place, which, in turn, usually creates more unforeseen consequences (see the English's rabbit/ferret introduction problem in New Zealand for an example).
As I drive around Rancho the rest of the night, I pay closer attention to the yards, calculating how much a stand of exotic palms costs in this yard, the expense of up-keeping a football field lawn at that house, and I realize that water flows not toward the path of least resistance but toward the money. (I feel like I'm having a Chinatown (1974) Jake Gittes [another Jack Nicholson character] realization here.) From now on, I'll be listening for the tell-tale crackle sound of longhorn borer beetles plowing deep into the eucalyptus bark, and praying that a plague of wasps doesn't soon fill the air and consume me.
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