We had a delivery order tonight that ended turning into a thing. Guy calls up and ordered $35.00 worth of food. He is a regular customer, known to be a decent tipper too. He also is frequently intoxicated when we get there. When the driver got there he could get nobody to come to the door. He could see the customer on the couch asleep, their child was up on the kitchen counter, playing with everything he could find. The phone, doorbell, car horn, pounding etc would not wake the dude up. I told the driver to just come back. That is when he made it clear to me that the kid looked about 2 years old and was in danger of either falling off the counter or injuring himself with something he found on the counter like the knives or even the stove. I drove out there, repeated all the things the driver had tried to no avail. The door was unlocked so we opened the door and were shouting and the guy would not wake up. The baby was throwing everything on the counter onto the floor, coffee cups, money, mail, laptop… I thought about going in and grabbing the child but the driver brought up the notion that if the guy did happen to wake up and see what he thought was 2 strange men making off with his child it would be bad. After about 5 more minutes of yelling ringing the doorbell and knocking while watching the baby throw stuff stuff around the room we gave up and called the police. 5 min later a fire truck, and ambulance and 2 sheriff deputies cars arrive. It took them several minutes of shaking and yelling to get the guy semi coherent and then they had to restrain him a little until he calmed down. They called the babies momma at work and had her come get the child and, after a period of time loaded the dude up into the ambulance to go to the hospital be evaluated. They did not know yet if he was going to be charged with anything. So, the baby is safe but we probably lost a customer. We where blocked in by the EMS and police so we could not leave until it was all done. All together we had close to 2 manhours invested in the order and did not even get the sale. We had about 8 or 9 first responders there. So has anybody else had this happen?
Wow crazy night. On the plus side the child is safe, and odds are you will get some good publicity out of the deal.
Know any local news reporters?..
In the scorecard that is far more important than your P&L, chalk one up for you and your driver. No need for publicity for doing the right thing. Thank God you guys were there to keep the little one safe.
If the driver had run into a burning building and saved a child, then you call the media.
You do not call the media to use somebody’s extremely sad and unfortunate domestic situation, where it sounds as a two year old may be being neglected, to help you sell another pizza.
And if the happens to call, you say “no comment.”
Piper,
While I agree that actively going out and trying to push the issue with the media would be distasteful, I do not see anything wrong with using something, however unfortunate, that happened to create goodwill in the community.
I personally would want to know of some business and / or employee who went above and beyond to help save that child from endangerment in an effort to help encourage others to do the same if the problem was presented to them.
I think by showing these acts of good will, and showing the rewards to them will help create a better community instead of the news outlets showing all the negatives that happen (people getting sued, attacked, or even arrested) for a good deed.
Personally I would stay clear of the media in this case. Yes what you did was good but to go to the media you would be showing a negative image of you customer. In my opinion publicly shining a bad light on another person is a dangerous PR road to take.
And along with the above exemplary advice, If asked by anyone, I would deny that you are the person who initiated the call to law enforcement too. Yes, I agree it was the right thing to do, but this just looks like all kinds of problems in this very litigious society.
This incident required the mother to leave work, she may lose her job because of it, and all sorts of yet to be known claims which may shine poorly upon you.
I understand what you’re saying, but you’re saying it as an outsider to the situation. The family probably doesn’t agree that it’s the local pizza shop’s responsibility to share their hardship with the “community”.
I assure you this family is having a very hard time already, that there are already social workers involved, and possibly DCFS too. If there are legal implications for this man, the justice system will handle it. There’s no reason to shame the family in public as well.
Rick and his driver did a good, noble thing as human beings. There’s no reason to paint everything with a “how can I market this” brush.
It doesn’t matter though, because no reputable news organization would touch this story with a 10 foot pole. The intent of my first post was to dissuade the OP from taking the advice of calling the news media in the first place.
We have no intention of discussing this in the media or using it to promote our shop It was actually a very difficult situation and a difficult call to make. I give the driver all the credit for pressuring me because when he described the kid crawling on the counter I was envisioning a 4 year old that would climb up and down as needed and I wanted him to walk away, this kid was actually less than 2 years old and managed to climb up a chair and then use drawers as steps or something. When I got there I knew we were hosed because there was no easy way out. We both wanted to just leave but knew the kid would not be safe. The mama is going through enough now, if this story did hit the news I would want us left out of it.
we took a delivery to an older widowed woman, when the driver came back she said that when the woman came to answer the door, the driver seen her fall and she seemed dizzy and disoriented and was very concerned that she may have hit her head on the table.
Knowing that the woman lived alone and going by my drivers concern, I called her neighbors (good friends of mine) to see if they could go over and check on her. She didn’t call to order for a couple of weeks after that, she knew I had called the neighbors, and I told her that the driver was concerned that she had hit her head and didn’t think anyone was there with her and was very concerned for her well being, and because I went to school with her neighbors I thought they would be able to check and make sure she was ok. she was fine with that explanation, and thanked me for caring.
A couple weeks after that I learned that she was a closet alcoholic and probably just drunk that night. :oops:
Even though your customer was known to drink, you don’t know that he was passed out from that, he could have had any number of medical issues, so it was good for the child that you called, but also for his well-being.