Maybe go out, maybe stay home

[sovay]

At two-thirty in the morning our doorbell rang, massively freaking the cats. (They associate doorbells with vacuum cleaners. We have not been able to afford for people to come to our house with vacuum cleaners in four years, but the cats remember and they do not trust anything that rings.) After it rang a second and a third and possibly a fourth time, I went downstairs in my bathrobe to see if it was a crisis. It was a delivery guy with what smelled like Thai basil, trying to deliver takeout to the third-floor people. They were not answering their doorbell. They were not answering their phone. He finally asked if I could just give the order to them. I tried to explain that they were not housemates but other tenants with whom I interact mostly in passing on the stairs, but he insisted on handing it to me anyway.

The third-floor people did not answer when I knocked. I have left the food on their mat with a note on top of it explaining the situation and hoping it was something they actually ordered, although I can't really imagine swatting a person by sending them Thai food at half past two in the morning. spatch fears that they are elsewhere for the night and the order just reverted to their default address, which means that somewhere in Boston are two people really jonesing for their drunken noodles and wondering what went wrong with the all-night delivery. If so, I am confident that it will still be edible in the morning, but in the meantime the stairwell really smells like Thai basil and I feel it is heroic of me not to be eating my upstairs neighbors' food right now.

I hope it is not considered rude under the circumstances that we didn't tip.

[edit] THE MYSTERY IS SOLVED. The third-floor people left us a nicely handwritten note under the door explaining that they had canceled the order at one in the morning and were not expecting it to arrive hours later, after they had gone to sleep. They feel terrible that we had to deal with the delivery guy and the doorbell. I have assured them that we do not blame them for the balls-ups of the delivery service and we're just glad they weren't somewhere other than their apartment, missing late-night dinner.

Obviously, the moral of this story is that I should have eaten the food.

Comments

[lilysea]

I hope it is not considered rude under the circumstances that we didn't tip.

As the food was not for your household, or for your guests, I don't think you had any obligation to tip.

[lilysea]

At two-thirty in the morning our doorbell rang, massively freaking the cats. (They associate doorbells with vacuum cleaners. We have not been able to afford for people to come to our house with vacuum cleaners in four years, but the cats remember and they do not trust anything that rings.)

I am impressed and surprised by the length of your cats memories.

[sholio]

... I feel that it's entirely justified not to give a tip to a delivery person who rings the doorbell at 2 a.m. to try to deliver takeout they know wasn't supposed to be delivered to your address. I guess they're just trying to CYA, but still, who does that??

[thisbluespirit]

but the cats remember and they do not trust anything that rings.

LOL, poor cats! Don't trust the vacuums!

And, oh dear. Not eating the food was probably pretty heroic in the circumstances.

[cmcmck]

I suspect that you are a far more patient person than I!

[asakiyume]

This is the opening scenario for some movie, and I just want to know what happens next.

[a_reasonable_man]

Was delivery guy so insistent because he faced some sort of penalty if he didn't have someone accept the food? Was he used to delivering to college dorms? Still, I'd complain to either the restaurant or the delivery company. They can't have their people ring random doorbells at 2:30AM. In fact, that probably qualifies as disturbing the peace.

[ethelmay]

Sounds like a serious food safety issue to me. Hot food left to cool slowly is likely to stay in bug-growing range for a long time.

[gwynnega]

I have never ordered food delivery at 2 a.m., and I suspect there is no Thai restaurant open that late in my vicinity. So I am sort of marveling at the whole concept.

[pameladean]

Agh, late-night doorbells followed by unreasonable requests and major Thai food temptations! (I too now want drunken noodles.)

We once had somebody attempt (or so they said) to deliver a pizza at four a.m. We have a door phone, so mercifully the conversation was not conducted in person. They refused to believe that nobody had ordered pizza, were unable to provide the name of the pizza place or the name of the person who had ordered, and eventually became hysterical and heaved two very large pots of geraniums through the windows on either side of the front door. Fortunately these have narrow panes, so while the glass broke, only ferrets and similar smallish rodents would have been able to get through them. Also the front hall has locking inner doors. Anyway, I mourned the geraniums but there wasn't serious harm done otherwise. We never did figure out what was going on, though. Nothing like that has happened, before or since.

P.

[moon_custafer]

This whole situation sounds like an unfortunately-sober textfromlastnight.