The email.

I want to get back to the whole Jamie/Linda/Me trifurcate of hatred that I started in the mop bucket story. This thing festered for quite a while, and my punishment for the whole mop bucket incident was four beady eyes staring me down every time I walked in the door, and one order “Go home, we got plenty of people here. We don’t need you right now.” My paychecks were getting pretty thin.

Now, I wasn’t the sort of guy who really gave a rat’s ass if he gets fired from a pizza place. There are tons of places willing to pay a hard working high school kid minimum wage. But I’m also not the kinda guy who puts up with being pushed around all the time. So it was fine with me if I got fired, but I’d sure as hell better do something to warrant it.

So one fine afternoon, I walked in and was promptly told to go home. The kitchen was a mess, nothing was done, and I had just about had it, so I said, “No. I didn’t come here to do nothing. When my work is done, I’ll go home. Not before.”

Subsequently, I was cussed at, berated, and threatened by Linda, a snaggletoothed redneck who lived in a trailer (no word if it was down by the river or not) and drove a rusty Camero that she considered akin to a Nascar. The kitchen sure looked good though.

She clocked me out that day. It’s illegal, because I was still working, but she did it and then exploded out the door “taking her break”. She literally pushed a family of three out of the way to get to the door she was so steamed. I clocked myself back in and noticed… She had not clocked out! She was paid hourly, left the store, but not clocked out. Something was amiss, so I clocked her out! Yes, Illegal I know, but an eye for an eye…

Later that day, I left (at the end of my shift) before she returned. I heard later, from my friend Derrick, that she had come back and sat around for the whole evening. Then, after closing, she went to clock herself out and found out that she wasn’t clocked in! As you might imagine, she blew her top. Then she developed a conspiracy theory. Her best friend, Jamie, clocked her out to save money. Now, I don’t give her a lot of credit, but I would think that it would seem fairly obvious that I was the one who clocked her out. Apparently not to Linda though, she instead chose to believe that her best friend betrayed her. Oh well, makes for a better story I guess.

Well, Derrick and I surfed over to the website for the pizza chain one day and I decided to write an email explaining all of this to the webmaster. Why would the webmaster care? I bet he didn’t, but he’d surly pass that along. So I wrote about the treatment, the cleanliness of the store, the leaving without clocking out, and especially the knocking over of the customers.

A few days later… Well, it hit the fan, and splattered all over the place. Suzi was the manager that day, she liked me. Not because she actually liked me, but because she liked my girlfriend (who is now my wife) who also worked there. There was nothing wrong with Suzi, she was nice, a good manager, and not corrupt in any way. She related the following to my girlfriend and to this day, we still get Christmas cards from her.

The district manager walked in with my email, printed out, name and everything, and commenced to have a one hour meeting between Suzi, Jamie, Linda, and himself. Suzi, not a big Jamie/Linda fan, was silently pleased by all of this, while Linda and Jamie secretly decided that I might sue them, so they better be nice to me from that point on and bottle up their wrath. Whatever the district manager said, it must have been scary.

From that point on, they were sickenly nice to me. It was disgusting. They wanted to have idle chit-chat with me all the time and let me know how great I was doing. I longed for the days of foul mouthed cuss-a-thons and threats. It didn’t last too long though

They Took His Gun!

You are about to read a story about perhaps the most insane set of circumstances ever to collide in this earthly realm. First, a little back-story...

Friday nights were very busy because of High School football games. As games ended, the kids felt the hunger pangs of the required post game pizza. So they came to us. Now, most of them didn't actually have money for Pizza, so they came and milled around waiting to bogart pizza slices from their more fortunate friends. Occasionally, one of them would save of for a few weeks and buy a cinnamon stick or something. Thus, the large number of customers on Friday nights equated to a very low amount of profit while dissuading people who could actually afford pizzas from coming to the store to get one.

So, the managers decided they needed a rent-a-cop to chase off all the people standing around, with the hopes of bringing in some real customers. It's a sound financial strategy, but as it turned out, rent-a-cops are either freaking insane, or stupid.

We had guys who would sooner kill you as look at you, eyes darting around, twitching trigger fingers. We had idiot weaklings that sat around all night drinking cokes and talking about their military knife collections.

And so it was, that once more, the perfect storm of ridiculous circumstances collided and then exploded. Our rent-a-cop was fat, and arrogant, and pretty dumb that night. He was just asking for ridicule from kids who attend high school football games. They didn't hesitate to oblige.

So, mentally assailed, he descended upon two girls who sat peacefully eating their cinnamon sticks and told them to leave. (We guessed they looked like easy targets with which to assert some kind of authority over) Alas however, they said no. He told them they had better leave, or else. (Or else what? We were never quite sure). Obviously, this made the entire crowd pretty mad, so they all started teasing the guy and challenging him to duels and things like that.

Note: He did have a gun. We were worried he might use it.

So the kids left, and congregated in the parking lot (always a popular place for kids to hang out). The rent-a-cop was not happy, he wanted them as far away as his jurisdiction allowed (I suppose in his mind he was president of the world or something). He went outside and was immediately surrounded by chanting teenagers.

The facts from this point get a little fuzzy, I can only relate what happened inside the restaurant.

The manager suggested that the strongest of us go check on the rent-a-cop and make sure he was still alive. Spanky went to check it out. He returned with a grin plastered on his face and said, "You won't believe this, they took his gun!" (A fact later denied by the rent-a-cop when I asked). There was some speculation later that it might have been his Maglight instead, but regardless, the ball was rolling.

The manager cussed and dialed 911. She told the operator our address and then said these words into the telephone, "Shots have been fired!"

Our mouths were agape. Did we just hear that? Had she somehow misunderstood Spanky?

Moments later, the police arrived in a show of force that would have made Osama pee his burka. From every direction they came squealing in, slid sideways, and catapulted officers out of every door, guns drawn. The police helicopter savagely swished a search light around the parking lot. The kids scattered.

The police successfully managed to stop another teenage girl who was driving by at the time but had not even entered the restaurant. She was probably going home from church or something. No other kids were captured.

That rent-a-cop never entered our store again. I did see him one more time though, as I cashed my paycheck the next day at the bank across the street. He couldn't keep the calm in a pizza restaurant, but he could definitely take down an armed robber… Right?

Eye of the Tiger.

Try as you might, somedays, you just can't win. I was having one of those days at work. I don;t remember the circumstances, but something had soured my mood, soured it like a lemon in vinegar.

I had to do something. Then I remembered Rocky, working in the meat plant, punching the hanging sides of beef. Can't that guy just go the gym? He never punches a punching bag, he never lifts weights, instead he carries trees through the snow and punches beef!? Anyway, I think I'm a little like Rocky, just more articulate. So I thought I'd try it out.

Since beef is to slaughterhouse as cheese is to pizza eatery, I would punch the cheese.

I walked into the freezer, which was appropriate because I remember Rocky was also in a freezer, and looked at box after box of cheese, just asking for it. I punched them, all of them, over and over and the cheese was flying. It was raining cheese like sawdust flying out of a chainsaw.

I walked out of the freezer and brushed the cheese off my shoulder like dandruff. My coworkers looked at me, wondering why I was covered in cheese no doubt. I went back to work, stress successfully reduced.

Later, Derrick asked why cheese was all over the floor. I told him. He went to punch the cheese too.

Second box on the left and straight on till morning!

Every week, our store would receive a shipment of supplies. Usually, this consisted of pepperoni, noodles, flour, cheese (lots and lots of cheese!), and so on. The guy who drives the truck, having first donned his weight lifter's belt, hauls boxes and boxes of the stuff in on his little cart and leaves the kitchen looking like a poorly organized warehouse.

The manager then delegates picking the crap up and putting it away to someone who already has too much work to do. This person is called the Unfortunate.

The Unfortunate puts all the supplies in their proper place. Whenever I was designated as Unfortunate, I pillaged the Lost and Found box for something warm to wear, because you will be spending a lot of time in the walk in freezer. Then end result of all the Unfortunate's hard work, is a crapload of boxes. The boxes need to be "cut up", which means ripping the seams out and folding them flat so they didn't take up too much room in the dumpster.

One day, my friend Aaron and I decided to try something a little different.

We pulled his old Ford Ranger up to the back door, and tossed all the un "cut up" boxes into the bed. Then we drove to the dumpster, jumped out, and built a 8 foot high by 10 foot wide, cardboard wall! It wasn't windy, so it stood there pretty well. Then, just as the Friday night rush started to show up, we got back in the truck and backed up quite a bit.

Revving the engine garnered us some attention from the hoard of kids on their way in to make a huge mess. Then we gunned it and rammed through the wall at 30 mph! Boxes flew everywhere, he felt like movie heroes that drive through whatever they feel like. It was awesome! And the kids loved it.

Then, we spent 30 minutes picking up pieces of boxes.

5 Second Rule

While we're on the topic of Daniel. I should also relate a tiny story about how your health matters.

I was retrieving a bunch of frozen chicken patties from the walk in freezer. I had opened the box to make sure it contained chicken patties. Satisfied that the box did indeed hold frozen chunks of dead chickens, I aimed to make my way back to the make table (where we made the pizzas etc). In order to do so, I have to navigate the slippery floors near the dishwasher.

Generally, in times of heavy patronage, this part of the floor is covered in a gray sludge which scientists have yet to classify, but that consists mainly of water, soap, pieces of half eaten pizzas, and human slobber (just a tiny bit).

Despite my efforts, I slipped and a few chicken patties tumbled into the primordial soup below. I didn't fall, but I did bend over, pick the chicken up, and toss them into the trash can. Then Daniel walked by and spied 3 pieces of chicken in the trash can.

"What happened to those?" He asked.

"They fell on the floor." I said.

"How long were they down there?" He said, knowing full well that we were standing in a lake of nasty toxic leftovers.

"I don't know, does it matter?"

Here comes the kicker.

"Yea it matters, if they are on the ground for less than 5 seconds, they are still okay."

I looked at the soggy frozen patties on the top of the garbage can in mild horror. He looked at me.

"Well, it's been in the garbage can too long now." Then he walked off.

FOR SALE, Really cheap!

A few posts ago, I mentioned Daniel, and how he sought revenge against me for the hilarious gnome in the grill thing. Well, I remember it clearly (squiggly lines, squiggly lines...).

It was a busy night, must have been Friday evening. The high school football crowd had arrives and was milling about everywhere. My friend Aaron comes in and says to me, "Dude, why is your car jacked up?"

Daniel was PO'd, and I walked outside. My car was indeed, jacked up. The front wheels were about 1 inch off the ground, and written on the windshield was, "FOR SALE, 500 DOLLARS. CALL: ".

Apparently I was supposed to get in the car and try to drive off but go nowhere as my car was front wheel drive and my wheels were not touching the ground. Also, I was supposed to get a bunch of calls about a really cheap Honda Prelude.

It didn't work, but I appreciated the creativity involved. One of his more sober accomplishments.

AAPL

I bought 30 shares of Apple (AAPL) at about 27 bucks. It's up around 45 now! I can't imagine that this will last too long, but way to go Steve!

You ran over a what?

We had a manager once named Daniel. He was a very short statured fellow, but made up for it with inappropriately mentioning Chinese prostitute maneuvers and stealing money from the restaurant.

One night someone had a birthday party, complete with a large gnome piñata. Gnomes don’t really invoke Mexican images to me, but hey, what the heck! The poor guy spilled his candy guts all over the party room floor, and his carcass was split in twain then thrown in the garbage. Those kids got what they wanted from him, now to hell with him.

I came along to clean up the mess and happened upon the gruesome piñata murder scene. Then, I did something so disgraceful, so disrespectful, so inconceivable that you may doubt what you are about to read! I took that gnome and hauled him out to the parking lot, found Daniel's old piece of crap car and wedged half of that sucker into the grill. His poor little legs stuck out as if Daniel had hit him head first and ground the top of him up with the engine's fan blades.

I jammed his head under the driver's side front tire. Not only had Daniel severed on of these poor papier-mâché gnomes at the waist, but he also parked on top of another!!! That brutal, brutal man!

I took a step back and reveled in my handiwork. Amazingly, it looked surprisingly REAL!

So it was that I hid on the roof after work and watched him stumble out to his car. He got there, inebriated, and paused. "What the h#$#!!" He shouted. He walked around, examining the body parts lodged into his rust colored (he claimed it was painted that color, but this paint had a rust like texture) car. He looked around, the parking lot was empty. Nervously he approached the feet. I can't be perfectly positive about this, but from my perspective, he was drunk (we had a tap at the store, and he was known to frequent it after hours) and thought he had run into someone on his way in!!!

He grabbed on to both feet and quickly jerked it out while glancing over his shoulder. He almost fell over as the gnome's bottom half easily ripped out. He noticed it was hollow, tossed it on the ground, got in his car and roared off, crushing the gnome head under his tire without even noticing.

The really scary thing: Just now, as I wrote this, I realized I should have called the cops. Shame on me. Luckily, only a gnome was killed that night.

He found out it was me, and plotted revenge. Another story...

Economic Solution.

Vending machines should take pennies. Talk about bolstering the economy! People WANT to get rid of their pennies!

1 Minute Nap.

My wife woke me up this morning, saying, "It's 7:44, you better get up!" I rolled over, knowing that I set the alarm for 7:45, and attempted to go back to sleep. Yes that's right, I tried to go back to sleep for less than a minute. I think I did it.

Book News, Draft 2

After a long night in "Get the damn thing done" mode. I got the damn thing done. Or at least draft 2 is done. Observations...

Revising sucks. I hated every minute of it (perhaps that's why it took so long?)

I thought revising would take a couple of months, try a year. Poor, poor naive me.

Grammer check in MS word must be turned off, or it will assault you with the green squiggly during any conversation between characters.

I finally bogged MS Word down to the point which it became annoyingly sluggish. Maybe it's my computer.

Gmail is a good offsite storage location.

Read rec.arts.sf.composition or http://www.wilwheaton.net when you need inspiration to get back to writing.

It needs to be read again, since I haven't read it in a long time.

Even though I added and deleted a ton of text, the word count remains steady at 77K.

The end result is much better than what I started with.

And so the mop bucket sat...

As you have read previously, I'm a bit of a firebrand when it comes to management by intimidation. I've never been easily intimidated, especially when it comes to a minimum wage job for spare cash. Nevertheless, I take every opportunity to stand up when the Man tries to push me back down with his greasy cheese remnant covered hands.

And so it was, that the perfect storm of working conditions and tyrannical management occurred one summer morning.

Ideally, the person opening gets right down to getting stuff ready and making pizzas. You see, there's a buffet (neither Warren or Jimmy) on weekdays, so you need to build up a buffer of pizzas to keep up with demand later. This is made possible by the person who closed the store the previous night. Having cleaned everything up and put everything away, they have made it possible for you to take everything out again and start getting down to the making of the pizzas.

However, this one particular day, not one thing had been done the night before. Not only was all the pizza topping layed out on the table, ruined, but a nasty bucket of grey sludge that had been mop water in a previous, less caustic, life was sitting in the middle of the kitchen breeding mutant life forms. None of the machines had been cleaned. To make a long story short, I was pissed. And then even more pissed later when I found out that the assistant manager had been the closing person the night before.

Linda was her name. Linda looked like more of a man than I did. Her best friend was Jamie, the manager. Jamie later took out a restraining order (for unknown reasons) against Linda long after I went to college and became productive. The manager opening the store that day with me was... Yes, you guessed it, Linda. (see the perfect storm brewing?)

I knew that Linda did not know that I knew she had closed the night before. I had read this information off the schedule, but knew she was not smart enough to figure out that I knew. So I complained, loudly, about the shiftless morons who closed the previous night. She yelled at me and told me to take care of it because the district manager was going to stop by that day. Ahh, the ingredients for the perfect storm...

Imagining the chaos that was about to ensue, I went about ignoring everything that had not been done, and started making pizzas amidst the rubble of last nights massive onslaught (yes, I did get rid of all the ruined toppings).

Linda told me to clean it up again, and again, and again. I said no every time, but she wouldn't cave in and take care of it herself. So the mop bucket sat.

"Clean it or your fired!" She screamed in my ear, as I made pizzas. My reluctance only seemed to invigorate her anger and give fuel to the fire of the madness that infected her mind. Another thing I knew that she didn't, she couldn't fire me for not doing someone else’s job, particularly hers!

And so it was, the district manager arrived, and was being held, distracted by Linda, at the front of the store, while the mop bucket loomed in the kitchen. By this time, I had been threatened with bodily harm, termination of employment, and coaxed many four letter words out of the Assistant Managers vile maw (much to the enjoyment of my fellow workers). I specifically remember Derrick and I cracking up after every threat.

It was time to strike. I walked out front, interrupted the ass kissing session between Linda and David, the district manager, and said, "Can I show you something?"

He said sure.

I took him on a tour, pointing out every single thing that had not been taken care of properly the night before. He kept saying, "I see."

A meeting occurred shortly thereafter, the result of which involved Linda cleaning out the mob bucket and muttering verbiage at me more deadly that the stuff in the bucket. The district manager, an ultimately reasonable individual, dished out the management lessons that day.

Thus began the great, "We must find a way to fire that little punk" project. It never happened. But many more confrontations ensued. Stay tuned for more, and more fallout from Labor Wars!

Labor Wars

In order to set up some of the following Pizza stories, I need to take a moment (or two) to explain just how the management at my workplace operated (and probably still does) and how I chose to work in that particular environment.

As in any business, different managers managed the business with more or less of a focus on ethics and quality. Generally, this was weighted toward the less side, with a focus on spending less money on employees and pizzas by expecting each employee to do more than their share of work, or alternativly, just not doing anything and leaving the resturaunt looking like Moses just showed up and parted the pizza sauce (all over the walls).

I can't fault the managment too much for this however, they are simply lemings following the leader and trying to get as much out of the man as they can.

Evidence of this can be found most notabally once a year when the company began its infamous "Labor Wars" marathon. "Labor Wars" is a month long contest between all the affiliated stores in the chain, in which each store attempts to spend less than the others on labor costs. Unfortunatly, our store was the largest store and thus required the most labor.

What this meant to me, the employee, was that I could look forward to a month of going home early, when there was plenty of work yet to be done, and getting paid very little due to lack of hours. Often this manifested itself as concern by management that I was not spending enough time having fun outside of work, as they blissfully told me as I showed up, "Well, its not too busy, why dontcha just take off and have a good time."

Actually, I liked working. This is because I liked having money, which can be translated into having gas in my car or going to see a movie. It can also be translated, from a customer's perspective, as "This pizza tastes good. This resturatunt is nice and clean. I like the way my butt squeaks on the vinal seat when I slide into this booth"

Now on to the part about how I prefer to work in such an environment.

Generally, the managers who liked me, would keep me on as the guy who got to do all the work. This was okay with me, since I got paid even though I had to do everyone else's work. I will say though that it always got done, and got well done when I was left to do it. However, several managers didn't like me. I attribute this to my ability and zest for standing up to the man when he tries to bring me down. When encountering a manager who attempts to send me home early and when I'm not done with my work, I would just simply reply, "I'll go home when my work is done, or when my shift ends."

This garnered me a lot of hatred from certian members of management, and a lot of respect from other employees. I was, to some degree, the robin hood of the pizza shop. Attempts to "clock me off" where often met with me "clocking back on" and so forth. The thing was, I was a good hard worker and that made it very difficult to argue that I should leave when work was left to be done. Some of them hated me... I don't mean hate as in dislike, I mean hate as in HATE.

What do you get when your store wins the "Labor Wars"?

A management only trip to Florida.

What does the employee get?

A lot of dried up crud to scrape off the walls and floors while Managment is off in sunny Florida.

Google Groups, Deja-ized

I'm so glad I discovered groups-beta.google.com (Discovered is perhaps a bot much). It brings back a lot of the deja goodness that groups was before Google bought it and archived everything. Way to go Google.

The Great Swimsuit Model Caper

The pizza eatery I worked for was decorated... Heavily decorated... Decorated in that "the local thrift shop exploded" sort of way. It was like TGI Fridays, on steroids! During lulls I would often stroll around and look at the stuff they had nailed to the walls. Among other things nailed and screwed to the walls was an autographed James Dean picture (autograph never authenticated), wedding licenses, toy trucks, some stuff I found out by the dumpster (another story), and even a tin advertising "magic balm" - a magical substance that seemed to have the remarkable ability to cure all worries.

Further inspection showed evidence that the original owner of the balm was not a believer in the magic qualities it exuded, since the thing was still FULL OF BALM! Someone had driven a screw through the balm and into the wall, leaving a tunnel through the thick slime. The slime was so thick, not even gravity and time could collapse the tunnel boared by the screw. It smelled, so I shoved the top back on and walked away. I went back a few years later, and the balm was still intact, tunnel and all.

A strange thing occurred to me one day, the notion that nobody actually knew what was nailed to the walls, just the fact that stuff was nailed to the walls. The sheer amount of brain space required to even give a crap about all of that stuff was too much for anyone to afford, except me since I have a lot of free space up there. This fact lead to a series of experiments involving me removing and replacing items without notice for weeks and weeks. Furthermore, it became apparent that not only did the employees fail to notice, but customers seemed oblivious to their surroundings as well. I think I may have been the only one who even looked at that stuff.

So one night, I found a Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Model magazine laying around, left behind by someone who perhaps lost it in the confusion perpetuated by being surrounded by thousands of pieces of junk on walls. A devious plan was created. I would cut out swimsuit model pictures and strategically place them amongst the various things hanging on the wall in such a way that nobody would ever notice. Covering up a picture in an old framed newspaper, or a small model dangling out of the back of a toy pickup truck... That night, after closing, I placed no less than 18 photographs throughout the restaurant.

I proceeded to spend 3 MONTHS without hearing another thing about it. Then, finally, one night at around 10:00pm, a kid approached me as I bussed tables and said, "Dude, do you know that there are swimsuit models all over this place?"

I was overjoyed! Alas, someone has taken the time to actually look around. Moreover, they spotted the pictures placed inconspicuously about. I told him that I had done the picture placing and congratulated him on his observances. He said he thought it was cool and I agreed.

Well, 3 months of keeping that a secret and I had met my time limit on secrets. I spilled the beans to a select few employees I could trust explicitly to continue to keep the silence, and revere me as the behavioral observer that I thought I was. They laughed and laughed, but then one day they found a copy of something called "Buns and @#$$@%" (I'll spare the reader) under a table.

This turned out to be really, really bad. I came in one Sunday morning, about the same time as the district manager paid us a surprise visit. My "confidants", inspired by my little swimsuit caper, had spent the previous night (unbeknownst to me) taping pages of "Buns and @#$$@%" all over the restaurant in not so inconspicuous places (perhaps they missed the point?). For example, a roughly torn page displaying someone's posterior end had been taped, at eye level, in the middle of a baseball catchers chest pad. Pretty conspicuous.

Needless to say, District Manager literally blew a gasket and roared around the restaurant collecting pictures like a teenager picking up his room with his mom banging on the door. He manager to find all of the "Buns and @#$$@%" photos, and about half of mine.

My little social experiment had gone wrong, extremely wrong. I was about to become implicated in pandering pornography to customers, but it never happened. Nobody owned up, and the DM needed someone to work in the store. So we all got a stern talking to and then got back to work.

To this day, a swimsuit model peers out over the salad bar from inside an old time Coke bottle sitting on a ledge up above the soda machines and another waves gleefully from the upper window of the doll house on the same ledge. My work, immortalized, because nobody will ever notice, ever...