Can I be Nearly as Interesting as Slang?

[Elspode]

No, no...bestiality practitioners would be cow *porkers*...

Bruce: no, I'm not really planning on making it general knowledge that I write about these individuals. If I did that, I'd feel obligated to be a bit less...um...interpretive about my views of them. I don't need trouble. As Wolf mentions, few of them have spoken about any particular facility with or addiction to computers and online hobbies, so I'm not real worried that someone will Google themselves and end up here.

I was actually thinking of getting a pic of the bear, Wolf...but before I do, I need to modify my description. Apparently, pizza fumes cause hallucinations...I assume it is the mushrooms (which we actually ran out of tonight...egad). The bear has both arms at its side, and no sign. Don't ask me how I screwed that one up. I'm guessing my weary brain just made its own artistic modifications and reported back to my typing fingers the end result. It is, however, definitely barrel-striped, and it is definitely a fiberglas bear, standing at the side of the road.

Tips have been *awful* the past two nights, as have my routings. Still and all, with my hourly wage and route fee thrown in, I'm probably averaging about $9.00 per hour right now, over the course of my three-week employment history. While that isn't much, it is $9.00 per hour more than I make sitting here typing about it. Extrapolating my earnings over the course of a month, it looks like I should bank about $400 extra after taxes. This is probably worthwhile.

It was a fairly typical evening of pizzary, tonight and last night. All the personalities I have previously described were strutting in spades. I continue to be astounded at the positive, friendly, helpful attitude displayed by my namesake Patrick (aka Rufus). I quizzed him a bit tonight, and found out that he has been doing this in one form or another for *18 years*. It is obvious that he absolutely loves the pizza biz, and it is impossible to avoid being caught up in his enthusiasm. Although he is technically a driver, same as me, he functions much more on the level of a manager, and does everything there is to be done in the course of business with skill, professionalism and joi de vivre. Whether taking a phone order, making a pizza, cleaning a scummy floor or training a new kid, he is utterly enviable, a peson to be admired. I can't even believe I am as impressed as I am. It isn't like I give that much of a care about the whole gig, but working with him, you simply *have* to care. He has an uncanny ability to make you feel equally good about your screwups as he does about your triumphs. This guy should be conducting seminars, not making pizza.

I made my first pizza tonight...for myself. We're allowed one small pizza to eat while at work, although most of us make them and take them at the end of our shifts. Because we were almost out of small regular crusts, I made large thin loaded with sausage, onions and olives. It is damn fine, if I do say so myself. While it cooked, I was treated to a brief study of the Operations Manual, because I have received virutally no training so far. There is much to be learned, and reading about it really doesn't cut it. Learning to make a large variety of pizzas requires hands on experience, as does the entire order-taking routine. While I am (IMHO) highly skilled at customer handling, it is very easy to seriously hose an order being taken if you are unfamiliar with the computer system into which it is input. Even experienced people screw up, as evidenced by an order I was delivering last night.

When someone calls in, they are first asked their phone number. This, if they are a previous customer, results in their information and last order being pulled up. The next thing that one is supposed to do is confirm the customer's address. Unfortunately, this did not occur last night (a new girl took the order...Patrick's niece, as it turns out), and I found myself attempting to deliver a pizza to some seriously confused individuals. A couple of phone calls revealed that the customers who ordered the pizza had moved, keeping their old phone number, but changing their residence on the complete opposite side of Lee's Summit, about as far from their old house as they could be, and still be in Lee's Summit.

The whole episode cost me 45 minutes of jerking off during peak business time, excess driving of about 12 miles (in my Explorer, getting about 13 mpg @ $1.75/gallon), completely eating up the $1 route fee, and preventing me from taking other deliveries during that time. I got a $1 tip out of it in the end. Coupled with lost potential other deliveries, I figure that little fiasco cost me at least $5.00. Pretty disheartening, but then everyone makes mistakes. It is just that this one cost me, and no one else, money.

And so it goes...

[404Error]

Hey Els, here's a topic related article from USA Today. Just something more to think about while you're delivering those pizzas. Great stories by the way, keep up the good work! I've been working at a Sbarro Pizza restaurant since retiring from the prison and it is interesting work. There's a few unique characters working there too, just wish I had your writing talent to explain them the way you do. No delivery at this place but it is fairly busy, especially nights and weekends. Making the pizzas is the most fun I've ever had at a job in my life, I actually look forward to going in every day.

Companies that ban guns put on defensive

[Elspode]

I've actually found myself enjoying the delivery job, 404. Even most of the "Happy Chores" aren't too bad, for the most part. I don't have any immediate plans to carry a weapon, though. I'm not real sure if Papa John's forbids it or not.

It was an interesting day overall, actually. It started out with a trip downtown to report for jury duty at the Jackson County Circuit Court. I have been a registered voter for 30 years, and a licensed driver for 32, and I have only been called for jury duty one other time, about five years ago. Despite having spent five hours sitting in the Jury Room today, I *still* have yet to be selected to serve. I was selected as a Reserve Juror before being sent away today, but the chances of me being recalled before Friday are virtually nil (they have only called on Reserve Jurors twice in 30 months).

For my service, I received a certificate and a check which exceeded my costs of getting there, parking and eating lunch by about 34 cents. My boss was pretty happy, because they weren't keeping me. He essentially ordered me to get dismissed ("Do whatever it takes to get out of it..."), because I am responsible for our year-end inventory, which takes place on Wednesday/Thursday. Unfortunately, there was no way I was going to be dismissed prior to the selection process, so had I been selected, I would have had to go all the way to the voir dire process before I could have said or done anything to get me dismissed. That would have been a tough nut for me, because I'd actually like to have a chance to sit on a jury sometime. I'm at least that patriotic.

After leaving our Art Deco, 75 year old courthouse (dedicated by then-Senator Harry Truman), I went on to work for three hours. That was interesting, after having been gone since midday Wednesday, when I went home with the flu. Fortunately, we've been so slow lately, that I really wasn't all that far behind, and I should be completely caught up by tomorrow noon.

I actually went back to work on Saturday night, delivering pizzas. I did pretty well, all in all, although had I been able to work Friday, I probably would have made a killing. According to all accounts, it was a complete madhouse, with the manager calling in drivers and kitchen staff from other locations due to the volume of business. At one point, they apparently had *16* drivers on the clock! By Saturday, though, things were steady, if not entirely crazed.

Merle has become more conversational again, although his topic doesn't vary much. On Saturday, and again tonight, he shared some of his notions for making his ex wife's life more, um...interesting. Suffice to say that his ideas for doing so mostly involve fairly pedestrian, juvenile sorts of things ("Patrick, do you know if it is illegal to dump shit on someone's front porch?") When he said he might just send some dead roses, I told him that he was probably asking for trouble, since these days, all someone has to do is *claim* that they feel threatened, and one could be branded a stalker or something...especially a male; most especially an ex-spouse. Besides, I told him, if she's as big a scumbag as you've made her out to be, she probably won't know if the dead roses and/or shit weren't already there.

As Merle mused about sending his wife a box of chocolates with Ex-Lax in them, he thumbed through a catalogue featuring numerous imported "fantasy decor" items. You know the type...cheapass swords, dragon sculptures in resin, feng-shui rock garden indoor fountains...that sort of thing. I asked him where he got it, and he told me that Wes, one of the newer drivers, was selling things out of it. Apparently, Wes is quite the entrepreneur. The first night I met him, he was trying to fix up Merle with some Hispanic hookers he claimed to "know", and he's told Merle that he also has a highly lucrative Internet porn site.

I find both of the sexually oriented enterprises to be dubious claims at best, as Wes' outward intellect seems to be stretched just delivering pizzas on most nights. A man of unremarkable appearance, Wes is ostensibly thirty-something, with hair thinning on the top, and a bit of a hickish edge to him. He has a sort of soft, mumbling manner of speaking, making him both difficult to hear, and not very convincing as a potential 'Net pimp. I suppose it is possible that he's just working a delivery job in order to have some outward form of legitimate enterprise, but frankly, I believe that selling imported crap out of catalogues is probably as risque as this guy's life ever gets.

My runs were easy breezy tonight, very little backtracking or screwing around. I didn't get stiffed once, and ended up making the best total tips so far. While the job doesn't have a whole lot of benefits in the way of perks or cash (well, free small pizzas), there is the whole "eye-candy" aspect to fall back on.

People can be fairly unrestrained when they answer the door for the pizza guy. A couple of weeks back, I made a delivery to a slumber party of high school cheerleaders, all dressed as young girls dress these days, and all terribly bouncy and boisterous. Tonight, a young woman answered the door in about 2.5 ounces of some incredibly tight, vanishingly thin material which covered only the most critical areas of her jaw-droppingly appealing frame. And she tipped me $2.50 to boot! At another stop, a cheesy apartment building, the door was opened by a kid of about 20, revealing several very nice guitars hanging from the wall. I said admiring things, and was quickly invited in to give them the once-over. I also got tipped $2.00, for a delivery that was less than two minutes from the shop. On the downside, the apartment smelled pretty strongly of ether, so I hope the kid isn't a tweaker - although the Strats, Les Paul and Epi 12-string, plus the Schechter bass would tend to make me believe that he probably was.

It was unreasonably cold tonight, and very windy to boot. I have to find a way to keep warm while delivering, without being too hot when I'm in the store itself, standing next to the pizza oven from Hell. I'm sure most of you will say, "Wear a coat, dumbass!", but I'd rather have something a bit easier to deal with. I don't want to have to take it off and put it on over and over and over...

And so it goes...

[wolf]

Get yourself some polarfleece ... it will keep you warm outside, and shouldn't be as oppresively hot inside as a coat. Of course, always wear a hat, and a nice warm scarf would be useful.

Oh, and if that Wes dude were capable of making ANY money from his assortment of get rich quick schemes, he wouldn't be slinging pizzas.

[Griff]

Art Deco Courthouse! I'd like to see that, if you ever snap a pic. g

[Elspode]

Two weeks without pizza delivery has made me lazy; too lazy even to wax terribly poetic about my first day back at my second job. Suffice to say that, even though I have worked naught but the main job since December 17th (and had a very generous amount of holiday time off, plus a snow day), it wasn't exactly "time off". The death of our friend's son, the passing of my wife's aunt, the associated funerals, our 14 year old's appendectomy and the three breakdowns of my wife's car in this period of time more than consumed any real relaxation time we might have gotten.

Strangely, it actually felt pretty good going back to Papa John's tonight. I experienced two good omens on the way there. First, a deer leaped across the road right in front of me. The roadway was a sheet of ice, and there was nothing whatsoever I could have done about the large doe's presence right in front of my truck, save for perhaps a brief contemplation of some nice venison recipes. Fortunately, what little braking power I could muster was just enough to let her slide by with a margin of maybe three feet, and she bounded off into the invisible, frozen world beyond my field of sight.

Two minutes later, I was navigating the bottom of small depression in a narrow, tree-lined roadbed, and observed the fleeting, beautiful vision of the girding ranks of ice-encrusted trees being illuminated by an oncoming, but unseen, automobile. Its headlights flooded over and above the road's rise before me, causing the trees to glow fiercely, like silvery diamond corals, while I looked up to them from the shadow of the intervening rise. Thousands of refractions and reflections grew stronger and sharper as we closed distance between us, the hill continuing to shade my direct view of the oncoming vehicle, and causing the spectacle to appear as though it was hovering around and above me, not attached to the ground. The air was so clear, and the trees' illumination so bright, that I could not see the light spilling between the overarching rows of timber, enhancing the illusion all the more. It would have been utterly mesmerizing had the road not been so terribly narrow and slick, and I so very concerned about running off of it. It was a fabulous image, one of those that you will likely see only once in a lifetime, pure serendipity...the product of a chance juxtaposition of observer and observed. It was the kind of thing that makes you wish you could play back the movies of your memories so that others could share them with you.

It was good to see the pizza people after my time away. I hadn't really realized I was becoming attached to them, but there it is...the plain, honest truth of it. A new dispatching/ordering system had been installed while I was gone, and I had to learn a few new keystrokes, but it was fundamentally the same, if a bit less efficient than its predecessor. Business had apparently been very good, as there was an ocean of empty ingredient boxes in the back, and almost no pizza boxes made up in the front. I started working on making up pizza boxes, but I was quickly routed. I spent the best part of the night on the run.

I discovered that people do, indeed, tip better in inclement weather. I made my second-highest total of tips tonight, and probably my overall highest total per-pizza tip percentage. If it hadn't been for the one lady who had a coupon for a free pizza ("$1.07? But...it was *free*! What is the $1.07 for?" "Looks like the delivery fee, ma'am." "Oh...fine...here.") Although I get to keep the dollar, it scarcely offsets the actual cost of delivery for most locations, so I don't really consider it to be a tip, even though I get that dollar for every order I deliver. Then there was the poker party delivery...four 20-something males with a $19.46 order. I got $20 and was allowed to keep the change. Still, it was better than the lady with the coupon.

At the end of the night, I experienced a pang of guilt, as one of my "Happy Chores" was to dispose of a large quantity of dough which had gone over. The dough for PJ's pizzas is made, in this region, in a commissary in Iowa, and trucked in each day or two in quantity. It is made like a bread dough, and allowed to rise in the course of its residence at the pizza shop. It comes in large plastic, stackable trays, which hold 8-10 premeasured blobs of dough for each size of Original Crust pizza we make. If it goes too long without being used, it eventually rises beyond tolerance, begins to smell a bit alcoholish, and must be disposed. Tonight, I threw into the dumpster enough dough to have surely fed thirty starving residents of Sri Lanka for a couple of days, and for a moment I realized just how truly little we here in America understand about what it means to want for something. Even though my life is pretty shitty right now, it is shitty on American terms, and for American reasons. After all, I'm being paid to throw away something that, if it had been located in another part of the world, might have made the difference between someone's life or death. It saddened me, and gave me a moment of perspective.

Merle was the only one of the "featured players" who was working tonight, but we were all too busy to exchange much chatter. Since the wife's car broke for the third time *this afternoon*, I had to finish up and run to pick up my eldest son from his job, and so probably missed out on gossip and such. Pity, that. In a place so filled with youngsters, there's almost always some sort of interesting folderol to hear or observe. Perhaps I'll get the skinny tomorrow.

And so it goes...

[404Error]

Yet another excellent story, Els! Keep 'em coming!

Regarding the dough that had gone bad, in the pizza biz we call that 'blown dough'. It is a shame to waste food like that but it happens. Sometimes business isn't quite as good as anticipated and too much dough is made before it can be used. We make our own dough at Sbarros so it's doubly disheartening to have to throw it away knowing that it took a fair amount of time mixing the ingredients, forming the dough balls and setting up the racks. Oh, and you're right, it does smell like a brewery!

[lookout123]

is anybody else jonesin' for a high quality Elspode update?

[Elspode]

Sadly, there is little for me to update at present. We are just getting through the tail end of a two-week case of the plague, um...the flu...at our house (four out of five household members have had it), and so I haven't worked pizza for two weeks. In the interim, there has been much repairing and licensing of vehicles (perhaps later I'll discourse about the remarkable 1991 Ford Taurus with 31k miles on it that was gifted to us by my wife's elderly grandparents), treatment of sick cats, and primary job strife to battle. Oh, and the long runup to the Pagan Festival. That's starting to generate some stupidity as well.

[lookout123]

well, i hope the family all feels better and everything returns to it's relative state of normalcy( think fast, who made up that word?) soon.

[Elspode]

Originally Posted by lookout123

... normalcy( think fast, who made up that word?)

Some freaking crazy SOB.

[Griff]

Correct! That's President crazy SOB to you

[jaguar]

normality.

[lookout123]

i believe it was Warren Harding, the dishrag, aka the first president to host the conception of a child in a white house coat closet.

[gingerdumbandproud]

me dan gan gut mensilf unnemployed....... me dan tans aaf jubes tall haf dem haf bin sheet mon i have spent the last three weeks in bloody fucking job club, phoning every twat what ever posted an advert in yellow pages. it it just me, or does the government try to hold every body who wants a freekin life at the bottom of the pile, and any moron with money or only half a brain run things for them.
they say money goes to money???? well ive got about £1.80 to my skint ass name an it aint gettin any fucking bigger