The Customer is Always Right About to Get Punched

As you may or may not know, I now make pizzas for half a living on the nights and weekends, in order to support my opera career.  When I took this job, my good friend Dr. A-Z predicted that my future blog posts that did not involve opera or parenting would now be about food service.  Boy, was he ever right.  I mean, I’m not planning to turn this blog into PizzaDad, but there is such a wealth of material to draw from in the exciting world of the restaurant business.

Today I would like to focus on customers that I personally hate.  This may not apply specifically to you, but in a more general sense, I hope that you can all take my message of “don’t be a jerk” to heart in your everyday lives.

The other night, there were two of us working in the kitchen, and as soon as the other guy left to do a delivery order, we were barraged with customers, as well as an order for pick-up.  I was alone, trying to make as much food as possible, as quickly as I could.  I made the pizzas in the order in which the orders came in, and as I moved on to the pick-up order, the woman arrived to get it.  Now, she had ordered it only ten minutes earlier, so even if there had not been a rush it would not have been ready, but she didn’t care about that.  She was furious.  She told us that she ordered from us all the time and every time it was horrible and every time it was late and the customer service was appalling, and the employees were idiots who were intentionally mean to her.  She said this because we offered her a free appetizer while she waited.  But she did not want an appetizer.  She did not want to have the pizza for free.  She just wanted to yell at us I guess.  She was there about twenty minutes before her order was ready, and when she left, she told us that this was a test, and she would be posting horrible reviews online of our pizza place.

Now I ask you, does this person not deserve to get punched in the face?  The answer, of course, is “How many times?”  If you hate our pizza so much, why do you keep coming back?  We don’t like you any more than you like us, so howzabout you brighten both of our days and stay home?  Were you just having a bad day?  If so, maybe we could help you out.  Do you want to talk about it?  Is your therapist on vacation?  Which part of your face would you like to be punched in?  Because there is no excuse for treating anyone that way.

On the last shift that I worked I ended up taking one of the delivery orders out myself, even though I generally stay in the kitchen making the pizzas.  It was a $30 order, pizza, wings, etc, and when I pulled up to the house, this teenager type was waiting for me outside.  He kind of scowled at me, and quoted the price: $27.74?  I confirmed that this was indeed the price, and he handed me $28 and told me that he guessed I could keep the change, and while I tried to take the money from him, he started grabbing my pizza bag and attempted to pull the stuff out himself.  I tried to get the food out myself, but he was very grabby, almost knocking me over and almost dropping his food.  Ah, what sweet revenge that would have been, but he walked inside with his food, and I walked away with my 26 cent tip.

Now, I am not a fan of tipping in general, and perhaps someday I will write an angry blog about what a stupid and unfair system tipping is, but 26 cents is just insulting.  Just don’t bother to tip me.  I would feel better about it.  And while you are not tipping me, get your damn hands off of my pizza sack!  It’s your food when I hand it to you, not when it is in my warm food transport device!  You are lucky I did not punch you in the face!  I did drive on your lawn a little bit though.  Sorry.

Ok, well I’m glad I got that out of my system.  Tomorrow we can go back to talking about opera and cute children and stuff like that.  But if you learned anything from this, I hope it is that you should not be a jerk.  Because even if you are always right, you never know when somebody is secretly trying to punch you in the face.