Although I enjoy cooking and we always have a ton of food around here to make into a meal, sometimes I just don’t have it in me to cook. I look at the ingredients and my mind sees nothing. I’m taking some steps to remedy that — but we also like to support our local businesses when we just don’t feel like cooking anymore.

Confucius say: "Man who spills food, delivers here no more."

We’ve had our house for 4 years now and have seen a few delivery places come and go. There’s not a huge selection of delivery places in our area, but we’ve got 2 really solid ones and 2 more places we can reach within 5 minutes walk here in town. But since we had gotten a bit tired of the usual offerings, and we’d just gotten a new flier from a place called Food Rockers that we’ve tried and banned a few times in the past, we thought it might be time to give them another chance. We didn’t feel like going out in the cold and couldn’t stand the thought of eating another slice of pizza.

Now I mention that we’ve banned them in the past. And that’s because we have had a few issues with them before. But every year or so we figure they must have new staff by then and maybe they deserve another try. After all, the food is pretty good, they have a huge selection (Asian, pizza, pasta and even really good sushi– I know delivery sushi, beh) but are definitely not cheap.

Our first problems with them began when we started to renovate the farm back in August 2006 and were too tired to lift our arms to eat, let alone cook. Ayla wanted to greet the delivery guy the first night we ordered from them, which resulted in the man totally freaking out and throwing our food on the ground. Not a good first impression but we could somewhat understand his apprehension.

So we figured we should give the people a chance to see that our dog isn’t a killer beast…and things went better. In fact, I think we ordered from them  a few more times without casualties. Until the delivery guy managed to find the only screw that sticks through the wood in our front gate and pushed on it while opening it (we have a buzzer inside so we don’t have to walk outside to answer the door and they gain entrance into our farm). So he complains, we apologize (searching the surface of the door in our head to find where this screw is) and life goes on.

But we ordered from them a few weeks later and once again the guy opens the door by pushing on the screw. Why he couldn’t just remember to push somewhere else is beyond me…it’s not even in a space that we’ve ever even thought to push. There’s a door handle for crying out loud. Or at least push near that area where the door will open — not in the middle of the door. We thought he might get a wild hair and try to file charges or something for his “injuries”, so we stopped ordering from them for a long while. We even tossed out their menu finally because we just got frustrated thinking about them.

Last week, they had one of their runners hard at work and they put new menus all over our little town. So we once again thought it might be time to try them again. It’s probably been two years since we last ordered from them — they must have new delivery guys by now, right?

So we order, the food arrives, all is good, no one gets impaled. We open the food and most of the sauce for our Asian food is in the bottom of the bag, not the food box. Ok, it happens. At least there was still some sauce in there.

Next day, we’re running around all day, don’t feel like cooking but man was the food good last night. So we order from them again. This time Stefan notices that the delivery guy is carrying the food under his arm SIDEWAYS! Not only was some of the sauce in the bag, ALL OF IT was in there. We unpacked the food, opened the dish it came out of (sweet and sour duck) and literally drained the bag to put the sauce back in there. It was kinda gross and almost funny…if it wasn’t just totally careless.

Did we complain? Only to ourselves. We’ve come to the conclusion that complaining to delivery places is futile. But I am complaining to you guys. And I’ll write a review in Qype (like Hype in the US) expressing my dislike of the place for anyone else in our area who may give them a try. But that menu went right back into the trash…and I assure you, we will not be fooled into ordering from them again.

Thank you for listening to my rant. I will return to the chaos that is our life now and get the day started. Mackenzie is ready to get up, Ayla is ready to be walked and I’ve got the grocery shopping list with meals picked out for the next 2 weeks or so. Plus we’ve got a play date tomorrow morning so plenty to clean up around here too. Did I mention Ayla is shedding like a Yeti?

Do you have delivery places you loathe? Or some of the best delivery places on the planet? Share you fun delivery food experiences so I know we’re not alone. 😉