Tag: adventures

One of my favorite humorist bloggers and authors, Charles Gulotta, once posted an article in which he discussed the trials and travails of Restless Leg Syndrome.  It’s quite entertaining and I don’t mind at all if you go read it (if you haven’t seen it already) before we proceed.  Go ahead, I’ll just have another cup of coffee while you’re away.

Oh, good, you’re back.  Have you ever had such problems?

The only time I myself ever had such an experience was in Junior High School after having encountered multiple knee injuries while participating in football, wrestling, gymnastics, and track & field stuff.  On this otherwise normal day, I was coming down the long, winding central stair case of the four-story school when my left knee suddenly decided it wanted to be somewhere else and departed, claiming it would meet up with the rest of my body parts in the cafeteria at lunch time.   Continue reading “Getting a Leg Up”

After proving my prowess and mettle as a Road Warrior, Phone Jerk, Skin Flinger, Pizza Maker and Oven Tender I had earned enough merits to be considered a graduate of the company management training program and officially labeled Assistant Manager in Waiting.  But I didn’t have to wait very long before the manager in a nearby store decided to move on, his assistant was promoted to Manager and I was offered the Assistant Manager position.  I took it, of course. Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Little Big Boss (Manager)”

In this episode – the next to last, for those who are getting bored – I’ll reveal the innermost secrets of the pizza oven-tender.  A delivery pizza would not be very much use to you if delivered raw (or burnt to a crisp), so it could be argued that this position is one of the most important.

Across the aisle from the itemizing area were a honking big set of Blodgett ovens; two ovens with doors 5 feet wide and decks about 3 feet deep stacked atop one another.  They were gas fired and the gas burners heated the 3/4” thick slate slabs that formed the floor of the ovens.  We ran them at 400 degrees.  Want a pair of these beauties for your kitchen?  They’ll only set you back about 18 grand!

To get the pizzas into and out of the oven, we used a pizza peel – which looked a little like a giant aluminum fly swatter, but we NEVER swatted flies with it; I swear.  The technique was to grab the long wooden handle about half-way along its length so the end of the handle lay under your forearm and gave you leverage.  Slide the peel under the completed pizza (on an expanded metal screen) and lift.  The peel was quite slick, on a busy night you didn’t have time to move gingerly.  To keep the pizza on the peel meant learning to “bank” the peel as you swing around 180° to put it in the oven the way a motorcyclist leans into turns to keep from being thrown off the bike, lift the nose as you reach into the oven to prevent the pie from sliding off the end of the peel and splatting all over the back of the oven, then gently deposit it on the deck with a quick backward jerk of the peel.  As soon as it was itemized the pie needed to be in that oven, so we mastered the laws of pizza physics and practically flung those pies into the inferno – but in a very controlled manner.  Well, most of the time… Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Hot Stuff”

While the title of this story may sound like that of some hip new TV crime drama, it is in fact the name of the latest addition to my Adventures of Pizza Dude series where I reminisce over one of the jobs I held long ago.  Past episodes include Road Warrior, Phone Person, and Skin Flinger, feel free to check them out if you enjoy this one and haven’t read the others before.

After the Skin Flinger does his or her thing, the pizza in-process comes down the make line to have sauce, cheese and toppings added.  Our make line was a large, refrigerated, stainless steel affair with a rack made of steel tubes along the front edge for the pizza (on a steel mesh baking screen) to slide along and an array of bins or tubs behind that contained the makings.  Trays under the rack would catch the off-falls and could be pulled out for periodic emptying (recovery or disposal) and cleaning. Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: The Itemizer”

After earning my merit badges for Road Warrior and Annoyer of People I was taught what I considered the most fun part of pizza making: being a Skin Flinger.

A pizza starts as a dough-ball snoozing with its siblings in a large fiberglass tray.  The Skin Flinger scoops one dough ball out of the tray with a scraper and tosses it onto a floured make-counter.

Let’s step back for a second here and discuss pizza dough.  There are a variety of types of pizza crust, from the Chicago Style Deep Dish to the New York Style Thin & Crispy, to the California Style (although the Cali is noted more for it’s unusual toppings than a particular formula to its crust, but I believe it was this incarnation that made sourdough pizza crust popular).  The deep dish crust is like bread dough placed into an over-sized cake pan for baking.  The thin crusts are more of a cracker dough, which uses very little yeast and has little elasticity.  Both are different from a traditional pizza dough so neither of these are flapped.  Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Skin Flinger”

Once I’d earned my cape and mask as a super road warrior, I was brought inside to learn the next phase: phone person.  Essentially this was taking orders, writing them out in the company shorthand  on an order ticket, top copy to the pizza maker, sticking the rest to the proper size box  and putting it on the rack above the ovens.  The hardest part was just keeping up with the flow of orders on a busy night and dealing with people who tended to think they were much funnier than they actually were. Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Mr. Phony”

Long ago, when I was a young man (just after dinosaurs walked the Earth) I took a position that I felt would fast-track me to a lucrative position in business management. I answered a newspaper ad for manager trainees with Pizza World.

Pizza World was a spin-off (copy cat) of Domino Pizza. You’re probably more familiar with Domino than Pizza World, but in most respects they are the same. So much so that Pizza World was in the process of being sued by Domino for infringement when I came on board. It seems the Pizza World founder and SEO, Tom, had been a Domino Area Manager who decided he could do better by stealing Domino’s secrets and starting his own company. And he was doing quite well with it at that time. At the same time that Pizza World was being sued by Domino Pizza, Domino Pizza was being sued by Domino Sugar for their use of the domino logo, which the sugar company felt was too much like their own. It was a mess and in the end Pizza World came out of it OK.  Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Road Warrior”

My final offering for Creepy Tales month is a true story of a haunted house and the crazy people who lived in it:  my family.

When I was young my family spent some time sharing a quaint old house with an elderly lady. She was cantankerous at first, but turned out to be nice enough once we got acquainted. The only problem with her was that she was dead.

Throughout my childhood my family moved constantly and, like a troupe of gypsies we dragged our house around behind us. Well, actually a big truck came and dragged our house away, we drove on ahead in the family car to prepare a place for it to be set up again in the new location. Continue reading “Things That Go Bump”

For the month of October I’ve been posting true life tales of adventure,  daring and creepiness. This one goes in a different direction from the last three: while a serpent is mentioned, it is not the main character.  It’s a true-life story I first published in 1987.

Fate is like an overly long serpent, twisting and coiling back upon itself until it seems certain to tie itself into knots. Somehow, it never does. I found myself snared in a bight of this serpent a few years ago. I was late for work. I took a short cut past the old airport and pushed the accelerator closer to the floor.

I drove a 1969 Thunderbird–then only five years old–with a 429 Thunderjet engine, high performance cams, valves and pistons. The car was too heavy to be any good at street drag racing but on a long haul it was one of the fastest cars around. I could make the long run to Chicago at 115 miles per hour with the engine just purring along. Twice–that I know of–I had flashed past a highway patrol car which was hiding off on the roadside. Neither time did they try to pursue. Continue reading “Twist of Fate”