You're starving, it's bucketing down with rain outside and you don't want to leave the comfort of your office to get lunch. What do you do? Call for a pizza to be delivered, right? Wrong.

Hamilton's two pizza delivery firms, Four Star Pizza and The Ram's Head , can take up to an hour and longer to deliver food only a matter of a few hundred yards away.

And this despite staff blithely telling anyone who calls that their pizza will be there "in half-an-hour''. To many customers, it's the longest half-hour of their lives.

One employee at the Ram's Head recently told a hungry worker in a nearby office that it would take only 20 minutes. An hour later, the pizza had still not arrived.

"Well it's raining and the traffic's heavy,'' were the excuses proffered when the worker rang up to complain.

"But even the heaviest traffic would only delay a motorcyclist by a few minutes over the short distance to my office,'' said the irate worker. "And if it always takes longer when it rains, why don't you tell customers this when they order instead of making idle promises?'' "We do our best,'' pleaded the pizza man.

It is not only during working hours, though, that these firms sometimes fail to live up to their promises. Complaints have been made that the service is no more efficient during the evening, no matter how close to Hamilton you live.

One disgruntled woman pizza-eater, who lives in Paget, told Business Diary : "They seem to pluck a delivery time out of the sky and give it you as if it is gospel.

"Why on earth bother telling you your food will be there within half-an-hour when they know full well it is simply not true. I can't remember the last time I had a pizza delivered on time, and I live close to town.'' When the pizza does eventually turn up at your doorstep, the delivery staff still expect a tip, she said. "Why should we tip them if they turn up late? It would be fairer if they gave us a discount for breach of promise.'' Mr. Marico Thomas , whose firm Four Star Pizza started it all a year ago, said his staff never promise anything and are instructed to give customers only an estimated delivery time.

And what if this estimate is constantly wrong? "Sometimes it's difficult,'' he said. "I employ 70 full and part-time staff at my Hamilton and Flatts sites. Many of them are still being trained. It's difficult keeping staff in this type of business. There's a high turn-over.'' When demand was heavy, a time which he said was sometimes impossible to predict, it would inevitably mean longer delivery periods. Pizza staff should should tell customers this, he added.

Red traffic lights, parking problems and the speed limit all added up to extra delivery time. "We've only been doing this a year,'' he said. "I'm always glad to hear complaints because it means people want us to improve.'' No-one at the Ram's Head was available for comment.

In the US, there is a movement to stop pizza firms making claims that they can guarantee delivery within ridiculously short periods of time because of the high number of deliverers who were getting killed by speeding and jumping red lights in a bid to meet their deadline.

There's no chance of this in Bermuda, though. "Our delivery staff are under strict instructions never to speed,'' said Mr. Thomas.

Given the complaints of late, that's easy to believe ...