I Got You

There’s this thing people don’t always remember about delivery work:

we don’t just move food.

We move through people.

A lot of the restaurants I visit aren’t sit-down, candle-on-the-table places. They’re chains McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell, KFC, Popeyes. The places people scroll past without thinking twice, tapping order now because it’s quick, it’s cheap, and they’re hungry.

Inside those places are real humans.

Tired ones.

Overworked ones.

People juggling drive-thru lines, walk-in customers, and a flood of online orders that never seems to stop.

I spend a lot of time at the same Popeyes during the weekday lunch rush. Same crew. Same faces. Same chaos. And over time, you build something that looks like quiet familiarity.

I don’t shove my phone in their faces.

I don’t huff and puff when it’s busy.

I ask how they’re doing.

I talk to them like people, because they are.

Today, I picked up four or five orders from that Popeyes alone. The same woman helped me each time. She knows me. I know her. Not in a deep life-story way, just in the we see each other way.

By the time lunch rush slowed, my body was done.

My period did that fun little magic trick where it pretends it’s over and then comes back swinging, cramping, bleeding, exhausting. The kind of exhaustion that feels like it lives in your bones. I decided I was done for a bit. I said it out loud to myself:

You’re allowed to eat.

Everyone and their mother had been ordering the Popeyes chicken sandwich all day, and finally I thought, fuck it, I want one.

Chicken sandwich. Fries. Sweet tea.

Simple comfort food.

I pulled back into Popeyes, this time not as a driver, just as a hungry human.

I told her my order. She looked at me and said, “I got you.”

I thought, yo, okay, cool, thanks.

Then she handed me a cup for my drink.

A bag with a sandwich and fries.

Told me to have a good day.

She never asked me to pay.

She just fed me.

That meal would’ve been about eleven dollars before tax. And yeah technically, I had the money. But anyone who’s lived paycheck-to-bill knows what that actually means. Every dollar already belongs to something else. Spending money on food always comes with a quiet echo of stress later.

Standing there holding that bag, I almost cried.

Because it wasn’t about the food.

It was about being seen.

Someone saying, without words:

You work hard. We notice. You deserve to eat.

That kind of care feels rare in 2026.

She wears a hijab. To me, she’s just a woman doing her job with grace. But I know the world doesn’t always see her that way. Some people reduce her to fear, or assumptions, or politics.

Meanwhile, she’s out here quietly practicing generosity in the middle of a lunch rush.

Today, a woman I see almost every day reminded me that kindness still exists not loudly, not performatively, but in small, sacred moments.

Today, somebody fed me.

And I’ll carry that with me longer than the meal itself.

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Have you ever been on the giving or receiving end of a small kindness that meant more than it looked like on the surface?

If you feel comfortable, I’d love to hear about it.

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This is The Diary of an Uber Eats Driver:

a place where I write about what actually happens out here. Not the highlight reel. Not the hustle porn. Just real moments from a real human moving through real people.

If this resonated, consider subscribing for more stories like this, quiet, messy, human ones, straight from the driver’s seat.

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