THE BABYSITTER
Pamir Yapan was once greeted by a customer who was naked but for the bedsheet in which she was wrapped. Once, he arrived at an Allston residence and the customers didn't have $22 in bills to pay for the salads and sandwiches, so they paid him in coins. He didn't bother counting it; he just threw it in a bag. "Sometimes you don't care about the tip," he said.
Yapan has been driving delivery for Angora Café, a sandwich and pizza shop with a Middle Eastern accent, for 12 years. It's located on Comm Ave in the belly of the Boston University campus. He takes a lot of orders from students.
"Mostly they don't know where they live. We ask what street they're on, and they have to ask their roommate or whoever," he said at Angora on a recent Sunday afternoon. "Usually they're drunk — especially on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Or they're high. When they open the door, you can smell it. They have no responsibility. They get everything from their parents. They party all the time. I don't know how they go to college."
Yapan was raised in Turkey. When he goes out for a delivery run, he takes six or seven orders at a time. The goal, of course, is to drop them off as fast as traffic will allow. Sometimes he thinks the only way to conquer traffic would be to have a police escort. But there's another complication that consistently breaks his stride.
"People don't answer their phones," he said. "We have to be very fast so we can come back and make more money. When they don't answer the phone, you're stuck. Ten minutes later, they call. I'm on Storrow Drive, and they want their delivery. I tell them I cannot come right away, they have to wait. And they call the store and complain."
And then they call in a delivery order a few days later.
