KARACHI: “Hello, I placed an order for two pizzas over one hour ago. Any chance I will get my order before sunrise?” He overtakes two buses, a truck and an ambulance, dodges police personnel waiting for prey in a dark corner as he accelerates to reach his destination. But where is it? Quickly, he turns his motorbike around to reach the nearest street light. He takes out that crumpled piece of paper from his pocket again to try and make some sense of the address and directions handed over to him along with the order. He is sure he is on Khayaban-i-Nishat. Or is there a continuation of the same road behind a couple of other roads and streets? He is confused.

“The most difficult part of delivering customers’ orders to their homes is finding the way,” says Mohammad Waqas Ahmed, a delivery boy, and a student of BCom. “Karachi’s traffic being what it is, it gets very difficult sometimes to manoeuvre the bike without disturbing the food at the back. It goes to the credit of our packers who pack it so well that it stays intact. Add to that the policemen waiting to pounce on our carrier boxes on sight. ‘Hey, what have you brought for us today. Can we at least take a sip from your cold drink bottle?’, they ask laughing. They know I can’t run,” he shrugs, smiling. “Then I also get to hear stuff from the people I am delivering the food to. Sometimes they scold us like common servants. But what can one do? The customer is always right.”

Waqas says that despite the challenges, his job, which pays him Rs9,000 a month, is seeing him through his education. “I could be making more by making deliveries and working for more hours but I only work part-time because I study during the day,” he explains.

He says, “The bike belongs to the restaurant. I hand its keys back every night to our manager after getting off duty. And as there are no public buses operating late night I head home by qingqi,” he adds.

Sampson Safdar is one of the lucky ones who works with a multinational fast food chain. “My employers are good to me and my colleagues. I first joined the chain as a kitchen help. Then when I decided to switch to delivery boy, all that was required of me was to know how to ride a motorcycle. My employers already knew that I was responsible and trustworthy but they also needed to know if I could deliver quickly. Once satisfied they let me make the switch,” he says. “The bike belongs to me but my employers pay for the fuel,” he explains.

“Since we belong to a chain that has many other outlets all over the city, I only have to make the deliveries within a certain radius so I am pretty familiar with the way by now and don’t have too much difficulty in locating addresses,” he says.

Sampson, who has just recently done his graduation from the University of Karachi, is also thankful to his job. “I have a Rs10,000 a month salary not to mention the tips,” he smiles. “Now, I intend to do my Master’s in International Relations and am glad I can do that without being a burden on my family,” he adds. “But it is a good job to do on the side. I would not make a career out of it,” he says.

Sajid Hussain, meanwhile, works full-time as a delivery boy. “Some restaurants pay their delivery boys by the hour that makes them daily wage earners. Others such as multinational food chains pay them a flat salary plus fuel costs and some, such as my employers, pay them in the form of commission. I get to keep 3.5 per cent of the money made from the orders that I deliver. And working 12 hours a day, from 12noon till midnight, I get to deliver a lot of orders,” he says. “All in all, I make around Rs20,000 a month. It is not much but better than being a factory worker where one only makes Rs8,000 a month,” he adds.

The restaurant Sajid works for delivers food all over the city. “We don’t have a chain. We only have this one outlet in Saddar from where we deliver even to Gulistan-i-Jauhar, if the order is big enough,” he says.

“But we also have to deal with pranksters who call late at night to place an order and give us some address of a vacant house or something. Thankfully, it doesn’t happen too often as phone numbers can be traced. Still it can be a problem if the fellow switches off his mobile phone after placing an order,” he says.

The delivery boy says they have to rely on how fast they can deliver as the orders are packed in cardboard boxes and plastic bags only, unlike the multinational fast food chains which have electrically-heated pizza bags, padded bags, etc., to keep the food warm while being transported.

Having spent five years delivering food orders, Sajid says that he now feels a need for a union to represent delivery boys. “Thanks to couch potatoes, fast food and delivering food to your doorstep is now a big industry. But there are so many problems that delivery boys have to face like not getting enough fuel allowance that should be on a par with the ever-rising fuel prices, not getting medical insurance in case of a traffic accident while on the job, etc. I have seen restaurants simply discard a daily-wage delivery boy after he has had an accident. It is not right. I want to set up a union myself but I lack the resources to register it with the trade unions,” he sighs.