Domino’s And Me

Posted: April 17th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Miconian At Large | Tags: delivery, domino's, kansas, pizza, scandal, star trek | Comments

I worked at a Domino’s franchise in Lawrence, Kansas for a few months in 1993. I was a delivery driver.

My driving job involved a lot of sitting around on my ass, waiting for an assignment. While waiting, I usually was not expected to perform any other duties, so I would bring a book to work. One day, I came through the door to start my shift, and the owner said:

“….and you can leave the book in the car,” as if it had been the end of a long sentence, one that he had, perhaps, started months ago. During my interview, maybe. But I couldn’t remember that happening. I walked back to the car with my book, and then I returned to the store empty-handed, and then I sat there with the other drivers and watched the cooks make the pizzas.

Some of the cooks were really fucking good at making fast pizzas. It was a point of pride. One guy in particular was so fast at distributing toppings with his nimble fingers that, in a crunch, it was understood that he would be the one to make the most complex pizzas, the “problem pizzas.”

One day, a casual conversation among bored employees led to a challenge: could the fast cook have the most complicated pizza on the menu ready for the oven in less than three minutes? The cook good-naturedly accepted the challenge.

He wasn’t very interesting, but everyone liked him. A native Palestinian, he had, like most first-generation foreigners living in Kansas, clearly had something much different in mind for himself many years back when he decided to move to “America.” Now he was working full-time at Domino’s Pizza in Lawrence. Lawrence, I should add, is a very nice place, if you happen to be a student at the University of Kansas, or William Burroughs. Or a certain type of midwester counterculture hipster, or someone who went to KU and just never left.

The fast Palestinian pizza cook, though, was none of those things.

He reached for the dough. One of the other drivers, a sprinter, hovered his index finger above a calculator stopwatch.

“Go!” said the assistant manager, in an effort to show that he had authority over something.

The fast chef distributed the toppings across the crust with remarkable speed and accuracy. He was smiling. It wasn’t that important, what he was doing, but it was true that he could do it much better than anyone else in the room. Normally a fairly taciturn man, he was lettng himself take a bit of pleasure in this.

“One minute left,” said the sprinter with the calculator stopwatch.

The owner, a heavy, miserable man with a mustache, lumbered into the center of the room to take a closer look.

“This is for your next raise,” he said to the fast cook.

Suddenly, the tone of the event changed. All the air was sucked out of the room. The fast cook was no longer smiling, and neither was anybody else. The other drivers and I, all of us college students, exchanged quick glances. Was the owner fucking serious? Yes, we realized, he fucking was. The fast cook was fast, but he wasn’t that fast. The challenge, and his acceptance of the challenge, had been a joke. Nobody could prepare that pizza in three minutes. The fast cook was going to lose his next raise based on his failure to do something that he would otherwise never have been required to do.

His hands moved faster than I have ever seen another person’s hands move, before or since. It was like that episode in Star Trek: The Next Generation, when Data makes a daughter for himself, and thinks that he is no longer alone in the universe. But it turns out that he was mistaken; he made some fundamental flaw back in the planning stages, and now his daughter is dying. Data supposedly has no emotions, but there is a great closeup of his hands moving across the console as he tries to save his daughter, faster and faster until they are just a blur.

He made it. (The cook, not Data.) He got the raise (which probably amounted to less than a dollar per hour). We all breathed a sigh of relief.

Although that was the most exciting day I had at Domino’s, there was a lot of tension in that place. The assistant manager, who was just a college student like us, enjoyed barking orders. The drivers came back regularly with stories about the rich people they’d delivered to who did not tip. (Like waiters, we made less than minimum wage, the idea being that we would make up for it in tips.) The cooks, full-timers making less than $10 per hour, looked longingly the pizzas coming out of the oven. (The owner would sometimes leave a note, “No crew pies!” to remind us not to make any pizzas for ourselves.)

The owner used to come over to the drivers as we returened from our rounds, and ask “How’s it going, guys? Anyone making any money around here?”

“You are,” I would answer.

The take-out center was, all in all, a place seething with resentment and bitterness, which is what you will find at the back of every chain that puts people in uniforms and rewards enthusiasm for the mediocrity that comes with making food from a recipe that you are forbidden to change and delivering it to people who do not notice that you are there. We hated ourselves for agreeing to be there, we hated each other for bearing witness to what we were dong to ourselves, and we hated the customers for looking at us as if we were just funny-looking vending machines.

We never stuck the food up our noses, though. Not that it would have made any difference.

pizza cop image by cygnus921

delivery bike image by tiffa130

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