Flower delivery

During Christmas holiday freshman year, Jim and I had the opportunity to make deliveries for a local florist. They were going to pay $1 per delivery and we figured we would clear enough money to make it worthwhile. Once again my brother’s van makes an appearance in a story. Unfortunately it was acting up and if we turned it off it would not restart. The florist was Reidel’s. We felt we would clean up at first when we went to the delivery room and discovered a large number of arrangements due to be delivered to St. Agnes Hospital. We crammed the van with as many of those arrangements as we could and took off for St. Agnes. This was during the time where a number of the arrangements had the ‘un-candles’ – those glass vials filled with wicks floating on top of vegetable oil and water. As we pulled into St. Agnes we realized too late that there was a speed bump immediately ahead. We had the choice of either going over the speed bump as smoothly as possible or the wrong choice, which was to put the foot on the brake. After the van came to a stop, I asked Jim “How bad does it look?” Jim replied, “Really bad.” For some reason, Reidel’s had actually filled all the un-candles. We cleaned up the arrangements as best we could, probably transferring parts to other arrangements. After we dropped the arrangements at the volunteer desk we beat feet from the hospital, hoping that some pink lady (for the pink jackets that they wore) wasn’t relieved of her volunteer duties for screwing up all those arrangements.

The rest of the day we gathered as many grouped deliveries as possible, all the while burning through gas like Sherman across Georgia. When we returned for one more pickup the only items left were for Elkridge. We weren’t terribly familiar with Elkridge but we glanced at the addresses and most of them seemed to be deliveries to Race Road. Little did we realize Race Road stretches across most of Howard County with multiple breaks and twist backs, house numbering that makes absolutely no sense, and in some instances houses labeled completely incorrectly. By the time we finally finished this money-making idea we figured we really hadn’t cleared very much at all but it certainly was a fun experience. In these days of GPS devices we might have gotten up to twelve dollars each.