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I delivered a huge load of furniture to a "store" in Aiken, SC. My directions were bad, and I made some wrong turns, had to call the customer, etc. When I finally got there, I was on one of those fancy two-lane residential roads where they have a single lane in each direction, with a grassy median. Big ass live oaks hanging over the road, etc. Not exactly a truck-friendly place. I guess HHG guys have to deal with this kind of thing all the time, but it was a new one on me.
The "store" was some gigantic ante bellum looking house with about a 200' sidewalk to a big flight of stairs leading up to the huge porch, and then the door. They had ordered a metric buttload of high dollar, very heavy, very large furniture and king sized mattresses. We were only supposed to get the ass end as close to the door or dock as possible, and tailgate the freight, but "as close as possible" meant more than 200' from the door.
The "store" had "help" in the form of an 80 year old man with bad emphysema, who was supposed to carry all this stuff. King sized latex mattresses, huge hulking gigant ass armoirs and dressers and stuff. It was a sad thing to see, so I wound up helping, and ultimately doing all the carrying. All completely for free, of course.
It was a COD. They paid with cash. A few stacks of $100 and $50, but mostly $20 and even singles. $10,000, all in greenbacks.
There was a big red light on the porch, and they bought enough bedroom furniture to fill up every room in that place. I've always wondered if that was a whorehouse or just a bed and breakfast. Either way, paying $10,000 in random bills is pretty damn suspicious. Had to be drug money or whore money or something under the table.
Come to think of it, I had another COD like that for something close to $10,000. The guy was wasted, his wife had kicked him out, and he was sleeping at the store. Instructions said to wake him up at 8:00 AM to find out where his warehouse was. So I go at 8:00 sharp and knock on the window. He gets up off the waterbed he had been sleeping on, without any sheets, wearing nothing but tightie whities, and opens the door. Then I follow him to the back where he procedes to pour a Solo cup full of some cheap whiskey, then uses the booze to wash down a handful of big white pills. He drank the whole thing, and then another one. (What are those, 8 oz. I think, and a normal shooter is 1 oz. isn't it? So that's 16 shots of Cheap Turkey for breakfast, along with about four of whatever those pills were.)
He told me where to go, and sent a helper. We had to wait for a locksmith to change the lock on the door, because his key didn't work. Then we had to figure out where to put an entire truckload of stuff in that shit pile of a warehouse. When I got back to the store to pick up the money, he had finished that bottle, and started on another one.
He was slightly wasted, to say the least. I don't know how that guy lived. He gave me a hard time trying to count out $8,000 in $1 bills, while he was yelling at me the whole time, telling me what an asshole I was, how I was going to steal the money and stuff. I can't remember all of his drunken ranting, but after some amount of that, I finally said the hell with it, took what cash I could get, and left.
When I got back to the yard, I went right to the company owner and told him I was a truck driver, not a bartender, and I got what I could, and would not be held responsible if it wasn't all there.
CODs suck. I'm glad I don't have to deal with that crap anymore.
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