Who picks up the ball and throws it to What, What throws it to I Don't Know, I Don't Know throws it back to Tomorrow, triple play!

The phone rings.

"Thank you for calling Pizza Place, can I help you?"

"Yes, what are your wings called?"

*sigh* "Wings."

"Yes, what are they called?"

"Wings."

"Yes, the wings."

"...Wings."

"Yeah. I know you have them, what do you call them?"

"Wings."

"Right. Those. What are they called?"

*facepalm*

Pop quiz, hotshot

Let's say you buy something -- pizza, let's say. You pay for it with a credit card. The person you're paying hands you two receipts. One is marked MERCHANT COPY and has a line for your signature. The other says CUSTOMER COPY and has no such line. You sign the merchant copy.

Now: which of the two receipts do you give back to the pizza man?

A) The merchant copy, which you signed and is clearly marked as belonging to the merchant.
B) The customer copy, because obviously they would have needed you to sign your copy, for reasons passing understanding.

If you answered A, congratulations! You're smarter than my customers.

If you answered B, you are one of my customers. And I hate you.

There's an irony in there somewhere

Last week, someone repainted our parking lot. When I arrived on Tuesday, I found fresh, bright lines marking the spaces, and two new additions: handicapped spaces! Of course, we've always had them -- goes with the wheelchair ramp -- but they've never been marked before.

But I wouldn't be writing about it here unless something goofy happened. What is it? They painted the handicapped symbol on the wrong space.

It should be the one next to the wheelchair ramp. But it's not.

Same as it ever was.

At least he has a plan

One Saturday night, another of our drivers left on a delivery. A few minutes after he departed, the phone rang; the caller ID displayed the number for that order, of course.

Mini Boss answered the phone. I saw his face grow puzzled, then amused. Without saying a word, he waved me over. "They've called us by accident," he said. "Must've hit a button on their phone without realizing it."

Sure enough, the two of us listened for quite some time to the background noise of their apartment. We listened to them -- and there were quite a few people, must have been a party -- talk about sports, talk about drinking, talk about completely random topics. We listened to them yell at their kids. We heard our driver show up, we heard him leave, and we heard them complaining about their pizza once he was gone. (Hey -- they got exactly what they ordered. It's not our fault they didn't order what they wanted.)

We listened for, oh, at least twenty minutes. (It was slow.) And toward the end, we heard of the men present dole out this master plan:

"Here's what I want to do: I want to stop gambling. Eat some pizza. Fuck my wife. And go to sleep."

We hung up before we could find out if he followed through.

If your next word is "tumescence," I'm out of here

One of the waitresses was writing something today -- something for a class of some kind. Since I'm the source of all human knowledge, she turned to me for spelling advice.

She asked for assistance on spelling...

• Arouse.
• Peeking.
• Ravenous.
• Insertion.
• Pulverize.
• Tremor.
• Shudder.
• Convulse.
  

I don't even want to know what she was writing about.

Let me answer that question with another question: shut up!

"Thank you for calling Pizza Place, can I help you?"

"Yeah, I need a pizza delivered."

"Okay, what would you like?"

[Offended] "I...beg your pardon?"

"What would you like? To order?"

*click*

"...?"

The ruler's back [Erm, I guess, I mean, do you, I think, well, um...]

Over the years, I have become steadily less and less patient with people on the phone. At first, I acted as helpful as I could. But now? I'm done with that. If people are too stupid to communicate something as simple as a pizza order, that's their problem.

For instance -- I'm not going to finish sentences for them anymore.

"Do you have buffalo wings?"
"Yes, we do."
"Okay. Um, what -- how do they -- I mean, do you have -- I guess, is there, like -- I mean, I guess -- are the orders -- um -- ?" Silence.

Now. Clearly -- to me, anyway, you might be lost -- this person wants to know something very simple: How many buffalo wings come in an order? Perfectly reasonable. I have that information, and would be happy to share.

But come on, now. You're a big boy. Spit it out.

"I'm sorry?"
"Well -- you know -- um -- is it -- like, how -- erm...."

Sorry, buddy. You're not four years old anymore.

Leave of absence

Hey there. I know posts have been sporadic for the past few months -- believe me, I have excellent reasons for that. Between a slightly heavier workload, a few writing projects kicking my ass, and an awful, awful personal disaster I had to deal with (am still dealing with?), my motivation to write these things has diminished down to less than nothing.

But life is starting to clear a bit, and more updates are coming. Trouble is, I'm still trying to get to the finish line on my current writing project, so don't look here for new stuff until May.

Forget me not

It's not hard to forget things when you're delivering pizza. Someone orders a drink, some breadsticks, Parmesan cheese, or some other little side item, it's rather easy to rush out the door and not realize you don't have them until you're halfway to their house (or, worse, realize it as you're standing on their doorstep).

One of our drivers made that mistake last night. He got into a hurry and walked off without a part of the order.

Which part?

The pizza.

We have those big warmer bags, you know? He took one of those. Empty.

The mind boggles.

No jokes tonight

One of our other drivers, Mehdi, has been working there even longer than I have. He recently took a much-deserved vacation to his native Iran. The day he arrived, his father suffered a stroke. Though he hung on for a few weeks, we received word tonight that he'd passed away.

My condolences.

Words fail

"Thank you for calling Pizza Place, can I help you?"
"Yes, I have this coupon here that says you have boneless wings now?"
"Yes, we do."
"What's the difference between the boneless wings and your regular wings?"

*facepalm*

Multiple personalities are fun

We have a lot of customers for whom Spanish is a first language. Unfortunately, none of our employees can speak Spanish, so these phone calls are often deeply frustrating.

Once, though, a call got a little weird.

"Thank you for calling Pizza Place, can I help you?"
[badly mangled, heavily accented, barely understandable English] "Do you have anyone who speak Spanish?"
"No, I'm sorry, we don't."
[flawless, clean, accentless English] "Okay, let me get two large pepperoni pizzas."

The hell?

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.