Only on vashon- the weekly rundown 09/03/2021

This may be the most exciting week in the group since stackable-washer-gate. This week we all got to witness the unfolding of pizza-delivery-gate. 

Here’s how it started: Someone who’s new to the island asked if it always takes 2 hours for pizza delivery to arrive. This begs the obvious question- there’s pizza delivery on island? I had no idea. 

Ok, so it turns out that there is one restaurant that delivers pizzas. They’re a small operation with two ovens and one driver, serving an island nearly 4 times the size of Manhattan. Taking that into consideration, we can say that yes, it is within expectations for a pizza delivery to take two hours. 

It also doesn’t help that our island has multiple roads that share a name. There are two 115s, 107s, 103s, and  111s, and GPS will always lead you to the wrong one. 

Also, with housing and living expenses being so high, it’s really hard to make a living as a delivery driver, so it’s not a common occupation here. 

Many of us pointed out the reasons just mentioned. But it didn’t end there. The original poster got angry, telling us to quit acting like the island is in the middle of nowhere and mentioning that even in rural Egypt, one can get a pizza delivered in less than two hours. (She didn’t call it rural Egypt. She called it butt-fuck, Egypt, which, according to google maps, is not a place.)

One person posted a legendary burn, “You’re obviously hangry. Go eat your pizza.” 

Buckle up. We’re driving 36 hours to the all-night Papa Johns.

But seriously, it seems like a lot of rural Egyptian towns are fairly dense and compacted around oases, so it would be pretty easy to get from one side to the other. Maybe rural Egypt isn’t the best point of comparison for how food delivery should work on our island. 

Also, look how many Papa Johns there are in Cairo! The things I learn doing “research” for this blog. 

The poster wanted us to get with the times and raise our standards. But wait! The times are very very bad! If anything, we’ve lowered our standards over the past few years. We used to expect things like clean air and a habitable planet. Now there’s serious talk in the news of developing moon bases, private space stations, and other such living environments that have few of our favorite Earth amenities, like pizza delivery and oxygen.

And we’re still not done with the twists and turns. It turns out the person posting was not the person who placed the order. That person had been told about the wait time. This is starting to sound more like a communication problem than a pizza delivery problem. 

Others were more sympathetic to the poster. It takes a while to get used to the pace of life on Vashon and the lack of conveniences you grow accustomed to in a city. Islanders talked about how, after moving here, they started cooking more. 

I’ve got to admit, I feel a bit bad for the poster. She was new here, and we dragged her on the rants page. She was surprised that, for a page devoted to ranting, people were angry at her for ranting. Others pointed out that it’s a two-way street. We all rant at each other. 

In the end, the customer talked with the pizza delivery restaurant and they worked out their differences. So we had to move on to other things, and we landed on the price of an unfinished house. 

The unfinished house is selling for $750k. It’s beautifully staged with table and chairs and a ceramic bowl in the middle of a construction site. 

The basket is a nice touch.
Just a splash of art to make it cozy.

The real estate description reads, “This Vashon Island sanctuary holds the vision of two successive architect owners,” meaning it has twice been an abandoned work in progress. 

The comments on this veered into strange territory, and we got to talking about cannibalism and how the island needs a restaurant that serves cricket meat. I have no idea how we managed to get so side-tracked, but all I can say about it is, in the year 2021, my crickets and human flesh better get delivered in under 2 hours. 

Anna Shomsky
Author: Anna Shomsky

I'm a former teacher and a data engineer living on Vashon Island. My writing has appeared in Five on the Fifth, Women on Writing and on the Post-Culture Podcast. I wrote and produced the radio show Whispers of Vashon for 101.9 KVSH. I’ve had short stories published in the anthologies Island Stories and Chicken Scratchings, as well as through the Open Space Literary Project.

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