Dave spoils great night

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/12/2010 (5631 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Get ready for some holiday magic, because on Saturday night, the Delivery Boys rode again.

If you are not familiar with the Delivery Boys, they are a crackerjack team of designated drivers consisting of myself, Free Press publisher Bob Cox, and Julian Rachey, our paper’s recently retired sports editor.

Saturday marked the fourth year the three of us have volunteered with Operation Red Nose, now in its 16th season of providing safe rides home for holiday revellers and their vehicles.

We were among 21 three-person teams, all equipped with snappy red vests and nifty two-way radios, prowling the city’s snowy streets over the weekend. We call ourselves the Delivery Boys because it’s a lot sexier than our official name — “Team No. 5.”

Like every year, Julian and Bob made me the navigator. They do this partly because I have the God-given ability to locate coffee and doughnuts, even in bad weather, but mainly because they’d never set foot in a car, even if terrorists were pointing guns at their heads, if I was behind the wheel.

At the beginning of our shift, it was like being in one of those tedious Swedish movies wherein you wish something would happen, but it never does. When the bars let out, however, we suddenly found ourselves in an action flick where the thrills and chills never stop and, at the end of the ride, your heart is pounding like a jackhammer and you’re sweating like Mike Tyson at a Grade 3 spelling bee.

The big news was that a fourth member joined our team this year. His name is “Dave.” This will sound cruel, but Dave is a major jerk. He’s an opinionated loudmouth, a snotty know-it-all, one of those overbearing back-seat drivers you wish it was legal to strangle with a seatbelt.

For the record, Dave is the computer-generated voice of the global positioning system our buddy Julian recently installed in his SUV. It wasn’t the only voice he could have selected for his GPS.

“There was also some English woman, but Dave seemed to be the least annoying,” Julian advised us.

With Dave telling us where to go, I was no longer needed to provide professional navigational advice and had to entertain myself by using our official Operation Red Nose flashlight to make shadow puppets on the dash.

When our radio crackled to life with a call from the dispatcher asking us to pick up a client, we would plug the co-ordinates into the GPS, then Dave would blather non-stop about the best way to get there.

The thing is, Dave never shut up. If he wanted you to turn left at some point, he’d hammer this home incessantly. “Turn left in 500 metres,” he’d squawk in his snotty cyber-voice, then, two seconds later, he’d chirp: “Hey, turn left in 486.5 metres!!!”

I came to hate Dave. The worst thing was that if you diverted even one iota from his chosen path by taking a shortcut or stopping for coffee, Dave would suffer a computer-generated meltdown and begin shrieking hysterically: “RECALCULATING! RECALCULATING!”

This led to some difficult radio exchanges with the Red Nose dispatcher.

Dispatcher: “Hello, Delivery Boys, could you…”

Dave (shrieking): “RECALCULATING!!!!”

Delivery Boys: “SHUT UP OR WE WILL KILL YOU!”

Dispatcher: “I beg your pardon???”

Delivery Boys: “Sorry, we were talking to Dave.”

Despite this, we had a fun-filled night, even though whenever we picked someone up, the dropoff point, without fail, was always in a remote, isolated area on the other side of the city.

Since I wasn’t needed to navigate, my job was to help track down wayward clients. One of the highlights came when we strolled into a hotel lobby and a lovely woman stared at me with eyes the size of manhole covers.

“Are you with Operation Red Nose?” she blurted, perhaps tipped off by our red vests bearing the words “Operation Red Nose” in big block letters. Then, she flung her arms around me and squealed: “I LOVE you guys! You’re real lifesavers!”

And, of course, she was right. In the end, we drove at least a dozen mildly tipsy people and their vehicles home safely. But the most emotional moment came at 4 a.m., when we joyfully dismantled “Dave” into his component parts and stuffed him back inside his box.

On behalf of the Delivery Boys, I’d like to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday driving season. And if we ever let him out of his box, I’m sure Dave will wish you a Happy New Year.

Once he finishes “recalculating.”

doug.speirs@freepress.mb.ca