Friday, June 05, 2009

A Cheesy Story

As he pulled up to the curb, the brakes on Donald's Ford Festiva squealed like a group of teenage girls at a Jonas Brothers concert. The sound, which was the result of general neglect in the area of car care (he was driving a Festiva, after all) was sickening, but Donald had no time to worry about it. He grabbed the pair of pizza boxes sitting on his passenger seat, and opened the driver's side door, vaulted out of his car, and kicked the door back shut in one fluid motion. If someone had caught this maneuver on high-speed film, it would have looked rather impressive. Again, Donald had no time to consider such things.

He gripped the boxes tightly as he sprinted across the street and up to the front door at 908 Maple Circle. The Cheezy Deluxe and the Carnivore's Delight pizzas housed in those boxes had cooled considerably since Donald had departed from The Cheese Stands Alone Pizza Shop 39 minutes earlier. There were times when Donald loathed this form of employment. This was one of them. The tips were lousy, the customers were often unfriendly, and he was constantly reminded that other people actually had lives. While peers were enjoying social evenings with friends, he was fighting traffic, contributing to the poor health of the morbidly obese, and wearing ridiculous Cheese-Stands-Alone-issued yellow attire. The outfit even included a hat with ear flaps, supposedly designed to look like a chunk of mozzarella.

While he did not always find his job horrendous, nights like this made it seem like Hell's torture chamber. The response to a late pizza delivery nearly always followed the same formula. After a ring of the doorbell or knock on the door, an individual sporting a scowl would slowly open the door. A smartass remark, of the "Hey, you guys realized my order wasn't a prank call," would then be added to the equation. Donald would apologize. More "hilarious" quips would follow, with others that had also been waiting for their pizza dinner yukking it up. Donald would apologize again. The customer would remark that they shouldn't pay at all. Then they would pay, but stiff Donald on the tip. He wondered if just dropping the pizzas and driving off, never to be seen in town again, would be a better option.

-----

This delivery should not have been late at all. Donald had done his job, driving to the address he had been given. Unfortunately, that address was not accurate on this occasion. Twenty minutes earlier, just as he was pulling up to an addressed he assumed was correct, his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. Checking his caller ID, he noticed it was Alan, another Cheese employee. He flipped his phone open, but before his brain could process the "What's up" he intended to utter, he heard, "Don't yell at me."

Great.

"Okay. What am I not yelling at you for, Alan."

"You're driving to 908 Maple, right?"

"Yes. In fact, I can see in the front window right now. There's a hefty guy sitting on the couch. I wonder if both pizzas are for him."

"I'm going to say no, Donald. See I wrote down 908 Maple Street, but the order actually goes to 908 Maple circle."

Donald had learned long ago that if the only replies he could think of involved words he had first learned from Joe Pesci movies, he shouldn't say anything. He clamped his phone shut instead. For some reason, whoever had mapped out New Boston originally had put Maple Circle on the opposite side of town of Maple Street. He was furious. This delivery would be extremely late, and it was no fault of his.

-----

The late delivery interaction played out just as Donald had expected. As the door shut in his face, he had no pizzas, no tip, and no dignity. As he turned to go back to his car, his mind was flooded with thoughts of his job and his frustration with it. When he made mistakes, he continually heard about it. When the mistakes were not his own, he still often received blame. He had no future with the job. Nowhere to go. What the hell was he doing?

By the time he got to the street, Donald was mumbling with his head down. "I should just quit," He muttered to himself. "Why should I keep wasting my time in this stupid-"

-----

Donald woke up confused, with headache so severe he checked to see if some sort of medieval clamps were on his temples. He was not sure what was going on, but he was certain that this rather sanitary looking room he now inhabited was not on Maple Circle.

Later on, a kind nurse whose pace of speech rivaled the guy from the old Micro Machines commercials filled him in on what had happened. The fact that she did this as she provided him with a catheter was odd, but he appreciated the story. During his rage-filled trek back to his Festiva, Donald had apparently failed to notice a pair of headlights acting as his personal spotlights. Oblivious to his surroundings, Donald had been run down by a car that had never slowed down. Once his intrusive southern neighbor had taken residence, the speed-talking nurse mentioned that the accident would have been much worse, possibly fatal, had he not been wearing head protection - the Cheese-issued cap.

Stuck in a hospital bed with a fractured hip and a bit of head trauma, Donald now had plenty of time to consider anything and everything.  It was then that he realized that his self-pity and continual worry about his work was misplaced.

His job couldn't kill him. However, getting too worked up about it could.

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