In case you haven’t guessed by my sporadic, lacking-in-the-comments web behavior, I’ve been busy. Between house guests and house issues and book disappointments and general parenting, I’ve been devoting most of my free time to two words I haven’t used in a while: job hunting.
That’s right. It’s time for me to be unleashed on the work force. If anything, you can probably count on some good blog posts. Unless of course I’m too busy/tired to write. I suppose I’ll also have to exercise caution with who I write about too, so let me announce right now, if I’m talking about my Boss, I’ll be referring to him as “Joe the Plumber.”
“laser beam”
Among my job prospects is a pizza place opening up down the street. When I spoke to the owner, it sounded like he could also work around my kids’ schedule. I need to follow up with him this coming week, but the one thing that makes me hesitant about working for a pizza place is that if I actually get a job at a pizza place then the size of my butt may increase exponentially. I used to work in a pizza place back in the New Orleans days and I ate more than my fair share of crew pie and cheese sticks. If only I’d had a blog back in those days. That pizza place housed enough drama within its saucy smelling walls to rival a celebrity death match between Heather Locklear as Amanda Woodward vs Heather Locklear as Sammie Jo Carrington.
First, there was the owner, a large always-smiling Turkish man who we all suspected was involved with mafia-like activities. His wife, who really ran the place, was quite beautiful and not at all nice. She was also less than half his age and he met her when he first signed on to run the restaurant with her then-husband.
There were the guys in the back who were always good for a few laughs, except this one delivery driver, L, who was so not a team player that one night one of the delivery drivers, W, punched him in the face for leaving before helping out with the end of the night clean up. L called the police and had W arrested and Turkish Owner went and bailed him out and then yelled a lot at L (because, like I said, everyone knew he wasn’t a team player). Neither of them were fired for the incident, but L was “transferred” to a different pizza place and that was the last we saw of him.
Then there was Debra. If I were to cast an actress in the roll of Debra, it would be a young Kathy Bates with flaming red hair and a mindset like Bates’ character in The Waterboy. Debra was not nice to anyone and very rude and on my second day of work, she yelled at me saying I didn’t know how to cut onions. As if. My favorite Debra moment was the time she decided she was sick of having to tell people which was the door to the bathroom and decided to just take a Sharpie and write “Toilet” directly onto the door. I mean, for real, she couldn’t at least write it on a piece of paper? They repainted the door, and surprisingly Debra did not get fired. In retrospect, I bet Debra wished she’d gotten fired, because the way she went down wasn’t nearly so fun for her. One afternoon, Debra got into a fight with one of the other waitresses, Tara, in front of some customers. Tara told Debra she needed to stop being so rude to everyone, and Debra attempted to slap Tara. I can only hope Debra had intended to say something lame like “You are not the boss of me” but no words or slapping took place. Tara dodged it, and then – yes – Tara punched Debra squarely in the face enough times to send Debra from a vertical stance to a not-so-vertical stance. The customer wrote a note declaring it to all be Debra’s fault and that they shouldn’t hold Tara liable, but both of the ladies were fired. Tara would still come in from time to time to say hi (she was cool like that) but that was the last I saw of Debra.
Needless to say, these were isolated moments in my pizza place hours. Most of them were whiled away serving pizzas, beer, and wine to all varieties of individuals, and then leaving work and possibly walking across the street to the bar that Turkish Owner also owned and drinking Rolling Rock for one dollar. Those were the days, no? I can’t imagine drinking Rolling Rock now, even if I could get it for a dollar.
I daresay that if I can get hired on at this new pizza place it won’t be anything like the old one. For one, how could that other place be replicated?
And two… well, there is no two. I just don’t think that my old pizza place could be replicated.
In fact, for everyone’s sake, I hope not.
