Placed a Popeyes mobile order last night at roughly 11:15, at a location that _officially_ closed at midnight. Showed up, waited uncomfortably long at the drive thru speaker, before someone came out and told me the store was closed... at just before 11:30. Trying to get a refund on the order from "support" just gave me the usual AI chat bot runaround.

If I can't get a refund, can I at least go back and get that order fulfilled today? I'd like to have not wasted that money after all.

Today, I violated my "no Popeyes orders" rule when I was given an offer for $16 for 6 miles. That's way better than most of what I get offered! So, how did it go?

Showed up in the lobby. Told them whose order I was getting, and they tell me that they're working on it. 15 minutes go by, people keep stacking up in the cashier line, and I'm getting irritated. Finally, the same person who asked me the name of my order the first time asks me it again... and then tells me they don't have that order in the system. That is 20 useless minutes that I'll never get back.

HOW CAN THE SAME COMPANY BE SO BAD AT THIS OVER AND OVER AGAIN?!?!

Seriously, Popeyes deserves an award for sheer variety in ways of wasting my time. They could make you waste 20 minutes by gaslighting you into thinking they're working on the order. They could make you sit there for a half hour because they're having to cook up chicken, the main thing they serve. They can make the worst drive thru bottlenecks known to man, ones you can't get out of because the drive thru is only one lane.

I don't care how good the offer is. No more! Even Chipotle and Wingstop are better than this.

One place I was assigned to a couple of times in my early days of dashing was a Burger King with the most irritating pickup system possible. Get a load of this nonsense!

Since I was assigned to it at night, I assumed it would be like every other BK location, and I'd need to hit the drive thru to make my pickup. I reach the speaker, tell them what order I've got, and they tell me I need to come inside to get it. As I'll find out in a minute, this is because they're the only fast food location I know of in this city that does paper sign-ins for drivers.

So, I get out of the line, park, try to go inside... and the side door is locked. I assume it might be that they only leave one open this late, so I try the front door. Also locked. I have to stand outside, bag under arm, waving at them like an idiot for half a minute until somebody notices, comes to the door and unlocks it for me. Seems like a fluke mistake, right?

Anyway, I sign in, get the order, and deliver it. A couple hours later, I take another order from the same location, and this time, I park right away to go inside. Nope! Locked again! Turns out they're intentionally making this harder for all of us by locking and unlocking the door every time a driver comes in. I try to knock on the door and wave at them from outside again, but after a solid minute of being ignored in favor of the drive thru, I just gave up and unassigned.

I've been declining every offer from this location ever since. I'm not opposed to paper sign-ins, but this is the single dumbest setup I've ever seen to try and force it. Have any of you ever experienced this specific kind of shenanigans with a restaurant pickup?

What I mean by this is, whenever I'm picking up an order, I'll take the receipt picture and all when I'm still in the store, but I always wait until I get to my car to actually hit the confirm button. Sometimes, it works. Other times, the app decides to automatically confirm the pickup as soon as I take the picture. I can't find any consistent pattern to explain this behavior. Do y'all have any idea how I can avoid this going forward?

Last week: Papa John's order for $6, 4 miles. Not too bad. What could possibly go wrong?

I have a practice where, whenever the order is set to hand to customer, I'll message them a heads-up when I get within 2-3 minutes of arrival. This was one of those cases. I sent my message, arrived at the house 5 minutes ahead of deadline, and then double-checked the instructions: I'm supposed to call to get her to come to the door. Weird, but okay.

Well, I call, and immediately after the handoff from DD, I get sent to an answering machine that tells me "state your reason for calling, and I'll see if this person is available." Huh? ...Okay, let's give it a shot. Stated my reason for calling, along with the customer's name, and it acted like it was patching me through... before telling me they weren't available. Well, what was the point of that then?!

Naturally, my backup option is to send another app message, "hey, I can't get the call to go through, but I'm outside." Bear in mind that this also isn't a complex or anything, but a regular small house. Between that and the messages, there's no good reason why they shouldn't have been able to tell I was there, ready to finish the delivery.

Another few minutes go by, and at this point, I've been standing around like an idiot for 10 minutes waiting on any response. It's 90+ weather out, and I'm not interested in risking a CV just to wait any more on this absolute time-waster to come to the door. I went to the front door, left the order there, confirmed it in the app, and then left.

30 seconds later, as I'm near the end of the road going back, I get a phone call from DD. Oh boy. It's the customer, whose first words are "WHY'D YOU LEAVE MY FOOD ON THE GROUND?!" "That's what I'm supposed to do when no one comes to the door." "NO YOU AIN'T-"

Yeah, I'm not doing this. I could tell she wanted a fight, and just hung up on her mid-sentence. Thankfully, she didn't try to call me back or anything; I would've gone and reported her if she did.

Moral of the story: if you're so insistent on getting your order brought to you at the door, pay attention to when it gets there!

NOTE: I am extremely aware of the fact that it would be better for a mechanic to be the one handling this. I make it clear at the end of this post that I'm both a novice at this, and also am very short on money. I would not be posting to this sub if I had literally any other option available to solve this problem. I am not driving this car anywhere until I can either troubleshoot it properly, or somehow get the money for a mechanic service. If your only input to this thread will be to unhelpfully tell me off for doing DIY brake jobs, then please keep your replies to yourself.

Alright, this is gonna require a timeline to make sense. Here goes.

About a month ago, my front left brake pads started making grinding noise, evidently needing to be replaced. A week later, I bought some tools to try doing a brake pad replacement on my own; bear in mind that I've never done such a thing before. I popped the wheel off, but realized I didn't have the right size socket to unscrew the brake caliper... and noticed that fluid had been leaking out of the caliper and puddling on the ground, presumably thanks to the caliper piston being overextended. With nothing I could do at that moment, I buttoned everything back up and left to try again later.

At some point in the next couple of days after that, my brake pedal started sinking. It still functioned, but it took a lot more force than usual to fully stop. This remained the case even after I finally managed to both replace the pads on that wheel (one of them was completely missing somehow), and refilled the brake fluid reservoir, which was almost empty.

Today, exactly a week later, I was at an intersection waiting to turn, and my brakes suddenly went much farther down on power; putting the pedal to the floor barely did anything. I had to stop using the parking brake. After that one failed stop, the brakes then resumed working as they did previously for the next 10 minutes, then failed again, this time permanently.

(I know it's dangerous as hell to drive with dodgy brakes, but I was in the middle of a delivery route that was gonna pay a half-decent sum of money, cash which would come in very useful for the next part.)

Right now, while writing, I'm sitting in the parking lot of a Walmart, where I just finished addressing the only other culprit I could think of: replacing the front right wheel pads, which also were worn down like crazy. It had the same noticeable brake fluid loss going on as the front left before it.

Now, here's a part I assume will be important:

I have a C-clamp that I've used to decompress the caliper pistons in both of my DIY pad replacements, but on its own, it was literally impossible. Rock solid. The only way I could make it work was by unscrewing the valve on the back of both calipers, and draining the fluid out of them. Only then would the pistons retract when C-clamped. The first time, I didn't refill the caliper itself with new fluid, but I waited until everything was buttoned back up to add fluid to the main reservoir. This time, I did the same thing, but poured new fluid into the front right caliper's valve before reattaching it, then topped off the main reservoir again.

Well, it hasn't done a damn thing. Sure, I have fresh new pads on both front wheels now, but my braking power is practically gone... or so it seemed at first. I panicked, hit Google again, and saw another Reddit thread where someone talked about their brakes only working when they literally pumped the pedal.

I tried that, and what do ya know? If I press and release the pedal multiple times quick, it brakes more and more each time, and the pedal gets stiffer. My brake warning light also goes off when it stiffens. It then goes back to zero power when the cycle is stopped.

Right now, since it's almost midnight, I'm just gonna carefully limp this thing home for the night and regroup tomorrow. In the meantime, I'd like to know if there's anything I can do to fix this bizarre thing. I'm damn near broke right now, and can't afford a mechanic job, but as a full-time delivery driver, I need to get this fixed ASAP. What's causing this, what can I do about it on my own, and what tools will I need to do it?

It's a 2018 Camry SE. This isn't its first dance with brake issues, but the last one was that vacuum braking issue that was the subject of a Toyota recall a while back.

Thanks in advance to any of y'all that can point me in the right direction.