{"id":4005,"date":"2012-11-08T06:00:07","date_gmt":"2012-11-08T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.allandouglas.com\/blog\/?p=4005"},"modified":"2025-04-21T01:56:41","modified_gmt":"2025-04-21T05:56:41","slug":"pizza-dude-mr-phony","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/pizza-dude-mr-phony\/","title":{"rendered":"The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Mr. Phony"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"pizza<\/a>Once I\u2019d earned my cape and mask as a super road warrior<\/a>, I was brought inside to learn the next phase: phone person.\u00a0 Essentially this was taking orders, writing them out in the company shorthand\u00a0 on an order ticket, top copy to the pizza maker, sticking the rest to the proper size box\u00a0 and putting it on the rack above the ovens.\u00a0 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\u00a0much funnier than they actually were.<\/p>\n

With six incoming lines and a walk-up counter one could get frazzled on a really busy night just in trying to keep up, then some clown would \u00a0want to tell jokes or change his mind about the order or wait until he\u2019s on the line with the order taker to poll the room and decide what they want.\u00a0 I tended to say, \u201cYou folks figure it out and I\u2019ll get back to you\u201d and put them back on hold, moving to the next line.\u00a0 That did tend to tick people off and when I got back to them they were either pretty surly to me or asked to speak with the manager.\u00a0 Since this was one of those \u201cthe customer is always right\u201d businesses, we were expected to respond to jokesters and abuse with a smile, AND not keep anyone waiting on hold for more than a couple of minutes.<\/p>\n

Actually, I think the most interesting part of this position was not so much the work involved but the way the managers did the hiring.\u00a0 I can now reveal this closely guarded secret \u2013 which was not shared with me until I was actually a member of the management team, thus privy to the company secret hand-shakes \u00a0\u2013 \u00a0because anyone who was involved is now either dead or drooling on themselves in a nursing home somewhere.<\/p>\n

There were two stores in the city where I trained and this was a college town.\u00a0 The managers of these two stores shared resources, and both liked pretty college girls.\u00a0 The employment application bore the three\u2014spot domino logo used by Dominoes Pizza for reasons that were discussed last time.\u00a0 When a manager interviewed a\u00a0potential phone person (and they both preferred female phone persons), they would just sort of doodle on the application by filling in the dots on the domino while they chatted.\u00a0 Harmless enough, right?\u00a0 Except that this was a secret code; the three dots stood for an especially pretty face, a large bust and great legs.\u00a0 Applicants were scored on the sly in this manner and when it came time to call in applicants to fill a position, the dot-scores were used to select those that would be called to see if they were still interested.\u00a0 The only time you saw male phone persons in these stores was when he was in the manager training program.<\/p>\n

Because of this, my stay in this position was mercifully short.\u00a0 My training manager frequently admonished me for not being courteous enough to our valued customer, the discussion always ended the same way, \u201cGary, do you want me to spend 10 minutes letting this creep \u2013 I mean \u2018valued customer\u2019 jerk me around or do you want me to answer the other five lines?\u00a0 I cannot do both at the same time.\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019d come back with, \u201cYou just need to work on your people skills.\u201d\u00a0 However, when my eval came up the second time he awarded me with my pizza maker\u2019s hat and put a buxom, blue-eyed blond on the phone counter again.\u00a0 So we were both happy.<\/p>\n

The next line is:<\/h2>\n

http:\/\/dougbittinger.com\/thoughts\/pizza-dude-skin-flinger\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “The Adventures of Pizza Dude: Mr. Phony”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[19],"class_list":["post-4005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life","tag-adventures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4005"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21152,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4005\/revisions\/21152"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pineymountainfoster.org\/thoughts\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}