Five Oaks

Today I delivered a catering order to a town thirty miles or so to the east of my city. It's actually quite rare for us to cater to a residence and even rarer to travel that far. But this was a special customer. Let's call her Dora. Dora works for a company I'll call the Health Integration Group or HIG. Dora orders lunch several times a week for meetings of the doctors that make up HIG. She was having some kind of graduation party for a relative. Kathy the catering coordinator hates Dora for several reasons. First, she will call and order lunch for seven, when our minimum order is ten. She will ask that each entree be cut in half and demands knives, forks, plates and napkins for fourteen. She requests that her fruit salads have no honeydew melon in them and that her green salads are without onions. Dora has been known to call and change her order right up to an hour before delivery. The restaurant's Co-owner, who I'll call Tom, makes Kathy accede to Dora's demands because he claims she is our most important account. In terms of number of orders she certainly is, but Kathy is convinced that we are losing money after taking into account the reduced volume and extra labor, not to mention the substantial discounts that Tom gives her.

Using a Mapquest printout provided by Dora, I set out to find her home. A little longer that thirty minutes later I pulled into the Five Oaks Trailer Park. I spotted Dora flitting around outside of what appeared to be a clubhouse. I pulled the van up to the curb and had a look around. This wasn't a low-end trailer park. It was clean and uncluttered with small oak trees not much bigger than saplings dotting the grounds. The immature trees and lack of any other planned landcaping made it a sad, desolate space. The inside of the clubhouse was also clean and without much extraneous decoration. Just across from the door was a table with a big collage of photographs of a girl along with many friends. It was propped up on an easel. A couple of big homemade signs hung from the walls saying "Congratulations Tina." There was a seating area with a sectional couch and a large screen TV tuned to Great American Country's Top 20 Countdown. I set up the food and Dora paid me in cash. "Quite a nice little community you have here," I said, only half lying. Dora has always been nice to me and I could give a shit if the restaurant loses money on her.
She's not the kind of person one generally feels sorry for, but looking back on today, I have a new kind of sympathy for her.

In a reflective mood, I pulled out of the park and headed back towards my city. I avoided the expressway and stuck to the surface roads, taking my time coming home.