How little you mortals understand time -- must you be so linear, Jean-Luc?

[Sorry for the -- way -- late post. Blogger issues. Two posts today instead; first one now, second one tonight. Deal?]

So: time passes. It moves. Forward, generally. We can agree on that? Good. And we can acknowledge that things change over time -- that the objects around us don't always stay constant as time plods along? Yeah? All right then.

At about 9:30 Saturday night (and you know what that means), we received an angry telephone call from a customer. "I ordered a pizza from you," she said, "and it's cold."

Not outside the realm of possibility. So Big Boss asked for her address, and set about finding the ticket for her order. The way things are set up at Pizza Place, each of the drivers (there are three of us) keeps their tickets in a separate box until they're counted at the end of the shift. Big Boss asked me if I'd taken it, and I hadn't -- nor had Driver #2. Driver #3 wasn't in the building at the time, so Big Boss searched in that box and found it in no time. He looked at the ticket to see the time the order was placed.

See, it's unlikely that the lady had actually received a cold pizza -- as I mentioned in an earlier post, we generally get our orders delivered promptly. Some more exposition for you: the woman lives in an apartment complex less than a block from us. It takes less than forty-five seconds to drive there. (I know: not only do did I deliver pizza there, I lived there for a year.) But a cold pizza can happen, so Big Boss compared the current time to the time the order had been placed. If it was longer than, say, an hour, it was a definite possibility. The current time, as I said, was 9:30. Big Boss read the time the order was taken:

6:26.

Big Boss slowly returned to the phone. "Ma'am, you ordered your pizza at six-thirty."

"Yeah, I did. And it's cold!"

"Uh...yeah, I'm sure it is. That was three hours ago."

More amusing banter followed. Big Boss explained that pizza "doesn't stay warm for twenty-four hours." The woman eventually said that she meant the pizza was cold when she received it.

"Why didn't you call then?" Big Boss said. "Why did you wait three hours?"

"I couldn't find your phone number."

"For three hours?"

"Yeah."

"It's printed on the coupon on the top of the box."

"...Oh."

"And you called it when you placed the order."

"...Well...look, the pizza was cold. Can you bring me another one?"

Big Boss, of course, said no. And the woman, of course, got angry. "Why the hell not? The pizza was cold! I can show it to you!"

"Yes, it's cold now. As I said. But you got it three hours ago. What am I supposed to do about it now?"

The woman then began chirping for a free pizza, which Big Boss denied. "What the hell kind of business are you running?" she yelled.

"The kind where I stay in business," he said. "If I gave free pizzas away to everyone who asked for one, I'd be living under a bridge."

This missive was met with a stream of profanity that would have made David Mamet cringe, ending with the declaration that she would take her business elsewhere. "Fine," Big Boss said. "Take it to the fucking grocery store and buy your fucking pizza there and it won't get fucking cold when you make it in your own fucking oven." *slam*

I asked if he wanted to add her to the Do Not Deliver list. I was already poised to scrawl her apartment number right next to the Katrina victims -- same apartment complex.

"Fuck that," he said. "We're not going to those apartments anymore. We've had too many problems. And Pizza Conglomerate just had a driver get beaten up over there. Fuck it."

And thus, we stopped delivering to an apartment complex with over two hundred apartments.

Thanks for spoiling it for everybody else.