How very Short Cuts

Mini Boss is a vindictive bastard. Make life difficult for him, and he will go all Soup Nazi on you in a heartbeat. "No pizza for you!"

Case in point. A few weeks ago, a woman placed an hour about an hour before closing. She said she'd pick it up, and we told it'd be ready in fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes later, though, she hadn't shown. So Mini Boss called her -- she said she was at Wal-Mart, and would arrive very shortly. (For reference, the Wal-Mart she was referring to is about a mile away from Pizza Place. Hop on the feeder road, and the trip takes about ninety seconds.)

Closing time came and went, and she still hadn't picked up her pizza. Mini Boss began to grow restless. He called her again, and she claimed she was "stuck in traffic." Stuck in traffic? Between here and Wal-Mart? Unlikely.

He waited for a while longer, then gave up completely. He called her again, and she repeated her "stuck in traffic" claim. He told her that we had to close and couldn't stay open for her. And then capped it off with a veiled "No soup for you!" -- "If you call here again and we don't take your order, this is why." She pleaded for reason -- "It's not my fault!" -- but he stood his ground.

So we closed up and left. He mocked the lady the whole time: "How the hell do you get stuck in traffic?" he said. "It's, like, a mile." I agreed that it was unlikely. And we parted ways.

Not forty seconds later, my cell phone rang. Mini Boss. "So, yeah," he said. "I'm on my way home, and there's a huge accident on the feeder road. Traffic is backed up for, like, miles."

"Oops," I said.

"Oops," he said.

Guess it wasn't that unlikely.

Can't quite put the pieces together

It's about 10:30 p.m. on a Tuesday night. Mini Boss and I are closing up. I'm washing the dishes, he's counting the money. The OPEN sign is turned off, the dining room is dark, the doors are locked.

A man tries to open the door. Failing that, he frantically knocks on the window. It takes a minute before we notice him, and then another moment before we decipher his question as he yells it to us:

"Are you open?"

*facepalm*

An existential quandry

The kid was about six, I'd say. As I approached the house, he dropped the ball he'd been playing with and scampered over to me. This isn't surprising -- kids always race up to me. I am carrying pizza, after all.

"Are you the pizza man?" he said.

"Yes," I told him.

He looked up at me with his huge, brown eyes and said, in a voice clear and innocent, "Why?"

I still don't have an answer.

Definition theatre

Overhead: a conversation between Mini Boss and a woman at the counter.

MINI BOSS: I need you to sign your credit card receipt, please.

WOMAN: [no response; not visibly paying attention]

MINI BOSS: I need you to sign your credit card receipt, please.

WOMAN: Hey -- I'm not illiterate. I heard you.

*facepalm*

Trying too hard

In order to be an effective influence on the souls of the living, Satan would need to blend in. I mean, if you knew he was Satan, you wouldn't listen to anything he said, right? Unfortunately, our Satan doesn't quite have a handle on that.

A few Sundays ago, business had evaporated, and the crew was sitting around watching television. The Transporter 2, of all things, was on, and we sat around kinda-sorta watching it but not really.

Satan walked in and approached us. He looked at the television and said, with dead seriousness, "Oh, I love this movie. What is this?"

*facepalm*

Smile!

Mini Boss has an iPhone. A handy piece of technology, that: browse the internet, look at maps, listen to music. Oh, and make phone calls.

It also has a camera, which I conveniently forget whenever Mini Boss wants to hide around the corner and stealthily take pictures of something amusing. Like, say, me trying to deal with some idiot on the phone.



I can't even remember which idiot I was dealing with at the time. I think it was one of those "Hand the phone to the person in the house with the least information" calls. But who knows. I apparently make funny faces when I'm angry.

Fortunately for Mini Boss and the peanut gallery at Pizza Place, the phone call lasted long enough for me to approach the edge of a breakdown, as you can see here in Figure 2.



Feel the love.

(And if you look closely at the order pad I'm using, you'll notice that it's blank. Which means I was on the phone with them long enough to want to take a flamethrower to people, and they still hadn't gotten around to ordering anything.)

That doesn't go there!

Since we don't have a computer system for taking orders, everything is done by hand. As a consequence, pens are scattered liberally around the restaurant. They also have a habit of disappearing, since they're easy to pick up and slip into a pocket without thinking about it.

A few weeks ago, I saw a pen resting inside the cup in which we keep teaspoons. Bizarre, but not unfathomable: probably fell off a counter. I took the pen out of the cup and went about my business.

The next day, I found another pen there. Another accident? I again removed it.

And the next day, found another. Clearly, someone was doing this on purpose. But who would be dumb enough to store a pen inside a cup containing clean spoons? Was there actually a person cursed with stupidity of such a breathtaking scope that this would seem like a good idea?

Of course there was. "I didn't want to keep losing 'em," the Dumbest Waitress said.

I suggested keeping it a pocket. Or in, ya know, the cup we keep on the counter solely for the purpose of storing pens. This cup is all of three feet away from the teaspoons.

I guess she took my advice, though. I've found a pen there every day for the last week, and learned that my fellow coworkers have been doing it themselves, just so I would see it and get angry. Feel the love!

Just say no

Hey, kids: don't do drugs.

Most of the people in our delivery zone, of course, don't heed this advice. Especially on the weekends, we get many, many calls from high people. Some of them can handle it. Some of them....

A Sunday afternoon. A guy we'll refer to as Cheech calls us and orders a pizza, and he's so completely baked one almost gets a contact high just talking to him on the phone. We're a little slammed, so Mini Boss tells the guy it'll take fifty minutes or so to deliver his order. Cheech has no problem with this.

Twenty minutes later, the phone rings. It's Cheech.

"Yo, man," he mumbled, "where my pizza at? It's been, like, two hours."

I calmly explained that it had, in fact, been only twenty minutes. "You sure?" he said. I said I was, and he scoffed. "Whatever, man. Get to work!" And he hung up.

If you've been reading this blog, you know how well Mini Boss responds to directives. He hadn't made the guy's order yet, and he certainly wasn't going to start now.

Twenty minutes later, Cheech calls us again. "It's been, uh, like, an hour and a half," he said. "Where my pizza at?" Nice to see that he could time travel.

Again, if you've been reading this blog, you know how the story ends. Mini Boss + stupid customer phone call = belligerent rant and another name on the Do Not Deliver list.

Our lesson: buy a watch. And don't do drugs.

Bill Denbrough beats the devil

Our most regular customer came in tonight. We'll call him...Satan.

Satan never buys pizza. Most of the time, he shows up at around five o'clock, buys a few beers, plops in front of the television, and sits there all night. Over the course of those five hours, he will speak to anyone near him. About anything at all. Anything.

Even more annoying, almost everything the man says is total horseshit. He will express his deep appreciation for movies he sees commercials for -- when the movies haven't been released yet. He found me watching X-Play one day, and commented on the game they were discussing. "Oh, I just played that," he said. "It's really cool, man."

"You just played this game?" I said, pointing at the TV. On it, Morgan Webb was talking about Haze.

"Oh, yeah," he said. "I just got it."

"You just got Haze?"

"Yeah."

"That's weird, 'cause they haven't finished making it yet."

"..."

He once told me the long, intricate tale of how the Russian Mafia attempted to assassinate him in the parking lot of the University of Houston, by using poison delivered by a stunningly ineffectual assassin. This has become his trademark story for us employees, and I employ it whenever possible to give my fellow coworkers some perspective.

"Man, Satan just said [x]."

"The Satan who was almost assassinated by the Russian Mafia?"

"...Oh yeah. Never mind."

So we all hate this guy. But there is one night of the week when even Satan is welcome among us, when even Satan can be counted as a friend. Thursday night. Lost night.

Those who have read my other blog know about my passion for the show, and it's a passion Mini Boss shares. Since ABC moved the show to Thursdays, it's become a communal experience: from 8:00 to 9:02, Mini Boss and I practically shut things down and take over the dining room. We spend each commercial break excitedly discussing the most recent turn of events and wildly speculating on what might follow. And since Satan is always around the place anyway, he's become hooked on Lost, too.

But the experience didn't work out tonight. We were incredibly busy, and Mini Boss is at home recovering from surgery. Of course, I had the show recording on my DVR, so no worries about missing it.

Satan, though, got to sit in the dining room and watch it live. And once it was over, he felt eager to discuss with me.

"Man, Ben is in--"

"No!" I said. "Not one word. I recorded it, I'm going to watch it later. No spoilers."

"Okay," he said. "But Ben said to Juliet--"

"Stop!" I said. "I'm going to watch it the second I get home, and I don't want it spoiled. I mean it."

"Okay," he said. "Well, Juliet is--"

"I will kill you if you say another word," I hissed.

And...it worked. Satan went about his business, and immediately decided to start talking about something else.

Hey: we all have breaking points. Lost is mine.

We're talking about a line in the sand, here, dude.

I think he caught a cab

Big Boss told of me of an encounter he had this afternoon. A big, bulky guy wandered into the store and approached the counter. "Have you seen my friend?" the man said, and produced a picture. It was an image of...Jesus.

"I dropped him off here," he said, "I was supposed to pick him up."

Big Boss told him that no, Jesus hadn't been around. The man, looking sad, took his picture and left.

The most annoying customer in the world

(This is my fiftieth post here. Which means I've kept it up about twenty posts longer than I thought I would. Huzzah to me.)

I don't know how it happens, but it happens nevertheless. It happens every time.

The most annoying customer in the world calls every couple of weeks or so. It's not so often that we've memorized his information on the caller ID, but often enough so that we recognize him as soon as he gives his first name.

And somehow, I always end up answering the phone when he calls. Always.

His name is Omar, and he's about fourteen years old. Omar is always the one to call, rather than his parents, because they don't speak English. Which is fine -- except Omar is a goddamn moron.

Omar cannot remember his own address. Omar never knows what anyone wants. Omar doesn't understand the difference between thick and thin crust. Omar has called roughly forty times in the last two years, and he is still baffled by the process every time. And Omar has a bad habit of mumbling and speaking in unintelligible half-sentences, too, guaranteeing that every call will end with you popping a few Aleve and waiting for the swelling to go down.

He called tonight. I try my best to remain patient...but sometimes, I lose it. Like today.

When he gave his name, I inwardly groaned, but kept my air of Customer Service Expert. This lasted exactly one question.

"What's your phone number?"
"832-555-152380."
"..."

Here we go again. Again.

"Um, could you repeat that?"
"832-555-152380."
"Are you sure that's right?"
"Yes."
"Because that can't be right. That's too many digits."
"Um...It...um...I was....It...um...It's my mom's phone."
"Uh...huh...."
"That's her number."
"Um, no, it's not. That number has too many digits."
"But...I....But....But....But...."

Silence.

Sigh.

"So...I need your phone number. The correct phone number."
"Um...um....I....just a second."

I hear him speaking Spanish to someone -- sounds like his mom. And he comes back with the correct number.

"832-555-2380."
"Okay. What's your address?"
"832...555...2380."

Kill me now.

"No, what is your address?"
"My -- what? Oh. Oh. Um. Uh...um. Uh...."

And after several moments of that, I finally get an address. I take his order. It's mercifully uncomplicated, but I still have to wade through oceans of um's and uh's to get there. My patience wears thin. But then, it's over, and I'm done with this idiot.

Or so I thought.

After I give him his total and delivery time, I thank him and start to hang up, but he says, "Can I ask you a question?"

"Uh, sure," I say.

"You're new, aren't you?"

Long silence. Cold silence.

"Um, what?"
"Are you new?"
"Am I...am I new? Is that what you're asking me?"
"Yeah."
"What does that have to do with anything?"
"Um...uh...um...."

Grr.

"No, I'm not new. I'm the one who answers your call every time you order, Omar."
"Um...uh...oh. Oh."
"Was there anything else?"
"Uh...no."
"Okay then."

And I hung up.

I hate that damn kid.