Worst Mistakes

I sincerely apologize for my long absence. I just haven't wanted to think about pizza biz outside of actual pizza biz at all for the past week. You will soon understand why. The length of this post will most likely make up for the lack of them for the past week. I apologize about that too. If you don't make it through the end of this post, I totally understand. My advice: if you're busy or get bored with long stories, break it in half. Read the first half one day, and come back to read the second half later. No one will be angry or judge you. And my feelings will not be hurt. I triple dog promise.

I worked the 4th of July...my shift was from 10am-3pm. Not too bad...the real parties on the 4th don't happen until grilling out at dinner anyway. Which is naturally what I had planned. An evening with my family and some family friends and Grace Hooper. (Grace Hooper bailed...someone please give her a hard time about it.)

So let me just ask you...would you think people would order a lot of pizza on the 4th? I sure wouldn't. (I personally didn't even eat lunch that day to leave lots of room in my stomach for Chad Powers' famous smoked Boston butt and perfectly grilled lamb chops. Looking back, it was a both brilliant and disastrous idea. I was incredibly hungry and grumpy come late afternoon. But oh my goodness when I finally tasted that meal, all my troubles were quickly forgotten.) 

Anyway, if you answered no, like me, to my question, you were wrong.

Upon further reflection, this kind of makes sense...we were slammed at lunch time. But apparently we were really slow that night. Which obviously, people want to grill out. But no one wants to cook twice on the fourth of July, and if you have company over all day, you need to have a lot of food on hand. Pizza would be a good middle of the day kind of thing on the 4th.

In the food industry, there are two kinds of busy: steady and slammed. Steady is really great. You get a lot of business and make a good amount of money without too much sweat or stress. You just keep moving.

Slammed SUCKS. We didn't have a single call all morning, and then all of a sudden, one of our drivers was out for some reason, so it was just me and the boss. We got an internet order, so she was making pizza. The phone rang. I answered it. She started making that order. The phone rang again...I answered it again. By this time, the pizzas were coming out of the oven, and it's a conveyor belt oven so if you don't 'catch' the pizzas as they come out, they will eventually fall on the ground. Not the best thing to have happen. So my boss is now occupied with a job that you can't just walk away from. As I'm talking on the phone, another call comes in. And then another. I finally finish with one customer and pick up the next call, and at this point there are 2 lines to choose from on the computer. When you pick up the phone, one line will show the number calling with the word 'existing' under it, and the other line says 'new' under the phone number. So I'm thinking existing means that's the line you've just picked up, so I click on that one to start the order. 

Of course, I was wrong. You're supposed to double check the number on the phone's caller ID with the computer's caller ID. Because the words existing and new apparently are totally irrelevant to the line you've picked up. 

Essentially, I took a 4 orders in a row and mixed up the phone numbers, so that the orders were right but they were all going to go to the wrong people. We realized this as all about 6 orders were coming out of the oven, and at this point, we were slammed. Cosmo and I both ended up taking multiple doubles and triples that day, because we never slowed down for the rest of the time I was there. Which was until 5pm. (If you remember what my shift was actually supposed to be, you will understand that I was there for 2 hours extra. This obviously was a set back to my dinner plans.) I was on the road from about 1pm until 5pm, and my order mix up created quite the stressful scene. That was the biggest mistake I have made so far. It set us back so bad...all of those orders were considered late by the time we got them delivered...that means it took us more than 30 minutes from the time the call was placed to get the pizza to the customer. I had a couple of orders that took over an hour. Most people were really nice about this. Everyone at the store was super stressed because we had to call of these people back and figure out which order was supposed to go where. Mixing up about 4 or 5 calls like that was the biggest mess in the middle of getting slammed just out of the blue.

So everyone had to work super hard and try to cover my mistake for the next hour or two. It was miserable.

So then I worked Thursday and Friday, and then on Saturday I worked again, and within the first 15 minutes I was at work, I screwed up in a way that caused a major backlash again. This time was worse (is that even possible?). 

This lady came in the store for a carry-out...little did I know what we were about to get ourselves into. My boss had taken her order before I had even arrived, so I didn't really know the situation...the order was originally made for delivery, and paid for with a credit card over the phone. But then at the end of the phone call, this lady changed her order to a carry out. My boss told her the she was going to void her payment at that she had a new total (which was cheaper because there was now no delivery fee. Which is why there was a price change in the first place.) My boss told this lady that we would just take care of the payment in the store when she got there. 

So this lady comes in the store, tells me her name, and I get her pizza for her. I asked her, "Is this already paid for?" She said yeah, she paid over the phone because it was originally going to be a delivery and then she changed it at the last minute to a carry-out. So I'm like ok, awesome, have a great day! She walks out of the store with the pizza, and my boss comes over and is like "Did she pay for that pizza?" I said yeah, she told me she took care of it over the phone. Then my boss immediately was annoyed and was like no, you should have check on the computer first...we voided the payment and told her she would now have to take care of the payment in the store!

So she ran after her outside, and the lady had already gotten in her car. My boss tries to get her attention but the lady is backing out of her parking spot already and isn't looking at my boss. So my boss starts waving her arms, and other people in the parking lot realize what's going on, and start trying to help get her attention. Someone else was waving their arms, and another person was honking their horn. Then one of our other drivers pulls in and the lady has to wait for her in order to get out of the parking lot. She finally realized that everyone in the parking lot was trying to get her attention. Even now we are not sure if she saw any of this before that point. It was really weird.

So then she gets out of her car and is like "What's the matter?" And my boss told her that she still hadn't taken care of the payment because she had voided the payment over the phone because the price changed. So the lady came back inside with my boss, and started screaming at my boss about how she couldn't believe that my boss was accusing her of trying to steal a pizza. My boss was like no ma'am, I wasn't accusing you of anything. We just have to have you pay again because we don't keep credit card information in our system. But the lady just kept screaming about how she didn't like my boss's attitude about the situation and how she was basically accusing her of stealing and all of this stuff. Then she starts yelling about did you ever stop to think I was having a bad day already and you just made it worse? At this point I was like shaking...I was standing pretty close to right behind my boss because this lady wasn't actually physically threatening anyone, but she was way taller than any of us, and was leaning forward and pointing her finger, and never talked quieter than shouting. Screaming mostly.

Oh my goodness she yelled for like 5 minutes at least before she then asked to talk to my boss's supervisor on the phone, and then immediately changed her tone with him and was wanting the pizza free at that point. Basically it was this huge fiasco. Luckily I got to leave to take a delivery in the middle of the whole thing. I felt really bad for my boss though, because if I would have just double checked in the computer system in the first place, none of that would have happened, and she was getting screamed at basically because of my lack of attention to that detail.

When I came back, the other daytime driver was gone and my boss had been crying. (Confession: I kind of broke down in my car a little bit. It's hard to see a verbal explosion/attack like that knowing it's partly your fault. Plus it really just scared the ____ out of us all because it just came out of nowhere.) My boss said that customers like that didn't usually get under her skin, especially on the phone. She said a lot of times on the phone they're meaner, but you don't see them face to face, and it's just not the same at all.

Then my boss and I talked and sort of laughed a little about how I don't usually screw up, but when I do, it comes at just the right/wrong time and has huge negative impacts. She said other people have all made those same mistakes a million times, but the backlash of them was nowhere near the ones that happened when I made those mistakes. When I do something wrong, I do it right, that's for sure.

Here is a list of good things that did not balance out the bad, but were still good:

Cosmo's thoughts on his wife's and mother in law's cooking:

"I remember one time Kay's (wife) mother made meatloaf and you had to mas it up and pour ketchup all over it because it was like the Sahara!"

A girl who works as an insider talking about her grandma who lives in Kentucky:

My granny makes moonshine and buries it in the backyard [to hide it because that's illegal] and always makes her grandkids go hunt for it because she can't remember where she buried it. [Note: these grandkids are not old enough to know what moonshine is. She totally takes advantage of them to continue her illegal activities without their knowledge/understanding. Hilarious.]

I will leave you with a cliffhanger...Cosmo's craziest stripper story...you'll have to come back to read it...it will be my next post.