'I'm not walking up 17 flights of stairs': Delivery driver confronts customer who orders more than 224 water bottles to 17-story walk-up apartment

Every delivery person deserves to make $500 per hour at a minimum. And if I ran this country, I'd make it so. Every time I spot a delivery driver hauling packages in 95° heat, my heart goes out to them. They work on rainy days. They work when it's flooding and when it's snowing. On freezing winter days when the street is slicked in ice, they're out there with the package cart, dropping deliveries from door to door. The work is physically demanding and repetitive, and for many couriers, working on a tight time frame also leaves them stressed out. These people should be making a ridiculous amount of money for the hard work they put in… but many of them still only get paid minimum wage and maybe some tips here and there.

They also have to deal with some terrible customers, as this person shared. They do gig work for a grocery delivery service. However, they encountered the final boss of grocery deliveries: the water bottle guy. Check out the full story below to see just how many gallons of water this guy wanted hauled up to his 17th-story apartment.

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This delivery person got a very, very large delivery order:

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Here's how the customer started the chat, leaving just 1 minute go by before adding "????"

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Let's do the math here: that's 168 bottles of water, plus 28 liters of distilled water, plus 28 liters of mineral water. That's 224 bottles of water, not to mention that 56 of those are liter bottles! That's an unbelievable amount… I estimate that it would take the delivery driver maybe 7 trips for the packs of small bottles (assuming they can carry 2 of the 12-packs at a time), and probably 14 trips for the 4-liter bottles. Even with that estimate, that's a whopping 21 trips up the 17 flights of stairs.
Stay with me, we're doing more math now. Let's say that each set of stairs has 13 steps: they're asking this poor dude to haul heavy water jugs up more than 4,641 stairs, or roughly 2 miles of uphill walking. Of course, that's an estimate, but that's… insane. That's just a totally insane thing to ask a delivery driver to do. You'd need a small fleet of drivers to get this done!
On a personal note, I'd just like to add here that I lived in the world's tallest dorm building for 2 years. (Yes, seriously. It has 34 floors.) I lived on the 14th floor one year, and the 18th floor another year. Sometimes we had to evacuate by staircase during fire drills, and it took about 5 minutes just to walk down all those staircases. It always left my legs feeling like jelly, and I'd get dizzy from the endless spiral of stairs.
Luckily, I never had to walk all the way back up to either the 14th or 18th floors, because it's not even legal to make your tenants walk up more than 6 flights of stairs per building! There must be an elevator for the people who live there, and I can't imagine it's legal to strand your tenants for longer than a few hours.
I feel this delivery person's pain, and I hope they got a few better orders after this dude. And that person stuck in their 17th-floor apartment with no water or elevator access should call 311 and get their water turned back on ASAP… and then invest in a Brita filter instead of 158739450142739 water bottles.
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People were utterly flabbergasted that someone would try this stunt

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