Toss it up there

Time for another pizza story!!!

Our oven was about the size of a dumptruck, and it cost about as much as a corvette. It radiated more heat than the sun did, and it bothered me that the people making pizzas were sweating like a bunch of sumo wrestlers on the beach.

In an attempt to rectify this problem, a large hood was installed with dual exhaust ports that sucked up all the heat via powerful fans on the roof and blasted it out into the air (and possibally caused some icecaps to melt).

One day, when I was tossing some pepperonis around (they are a lot like tiny red greasy frisbees), One of them inadvertantly strayed into the path of the great sucking hole and spiraled up into it, disappearing forever (or so I thought). Something inside me knew that the pepperoni had to go somewhere, but I cared not for the physical details... It was cool seeing foodstuffs getting sucked up into a large hole in the ceiling.

Well, news of this amazing new pastime propagated through the employees of the pizza eatery, mainly by word of mouth-- my mouth. This was always proceded by a prompt example of the hoods pepperoni sucking abilities.

Time passed, pepperoni becaome passe. I look at the pepperoni as a gateway condiment in many ways. In this case, it lead to cheese, broccoli (we had a salad bar), and various other editable things like pieces of crust, part of the fish, etc...

Soon, we tired of these things too. It was time to start throwing boxes, latex gloves, and whatever needed to be picked up off the floor, up into the exhaust. On one memorable occasion, an inflated latex glove was released into the great void only to result in a loud screeching sound that persisted longer than any of us wanted it too. Finally, the glove was dispatched by some unseen force and the sound subsided.

For some reason, the kitchen started to heat up again. We were baffeled, or at least appeared that way whenever the manager stomped around and complained "Why is it so damn hot back here?"

As I arrived to work a few days after the heat returned, I was greeted by the manager, holding a box, full of pepperoni, gloves, styrofoam boxes, crust, someone's nametag, and various other things we hoped had dissapeared into the ether.

"What the hell was all this stuff doing up in the fan?" He asked me accusitorily.

"What? Why would that be in the fan?" I asked, stupified with confusion.

Nobody was ever fired, and we were much more cautious about the kinds of things we dispatched into the suckers, opting for things that were likely to break apart or rot away with time instead of non-degradable items. Good times... Good times...

Stay tuned for more pizza stories!